>disagree on the distinction, all issuance changes, 1559, the merge, progpow were hotly contested by miners
that is my whole point. you could relatively easy walk over miners, which is why the majority of these changes actually happened. miners != owners/users of the chain
that's no longer true now. you made your chain owners also the validators, which has all kinds of advantages. but it also has the downside that as a constituency, they have an effective veto right on everything.
its not a hard veto, its more of a soft veto in the sense things that are bad for stakers will be disliked already by 35% of your owner base. and this is a near impossible activation cost to pay. it can be done, but only at an absurd expenditure of fiancial, human, and political capital. not to speak of the opportunity cost of not building features that actually matter
and *this* is a lesson I don't think Ethereum has internalized yet.