Since it seems to be bad form not to have an opinion on the situation at the EF, here are my unsolicited 2 cents. There are two main reasons why I find this exodus alarming and while I suspect many think like me, I do not see this voiced up. I have very little to no insight of what goes on inside so this is all pure speculation. 1) People are stressed out, some people have left taking grants to continue working on the same topics but without having to deal with the drama inside. Others are taking longer or more often leaves to clear their mind. Some are clearly scaling down on work/comms. For the last year or two you could *feel* that many within the EF were under high pressure from different sources. Talking to many there, it does not seem to be a healthy working environment, and this leads to burnout. The EF not being a comfortable place to work affects us all in the Ethereum ecosystem. 2) Yes, new blood is coming and will come. Rotation is natural, it's expected and is healthy. However, replacing large parts of a critical system (and by no means the number of people leaving is small, neither they are junior positions) is dangerous. The biggest risk to Ethereum is not the gas price, or the price of ETH or the 12 seconds between blocks or scammers on Defi. The biggest risk is capture. Having the some of most knowledgeable and respected people in the field, leaving at the same time is a textbook case of how to capture an organization. The impact of these departures is making non-trivial steps for a brittle governance. @peter_szilagyi already warned of the impacts to governance of phasing out entire teams with Lean Ethereum, this is just another aspects of the same movement. Now I definitely support the EF's philosophy of substraction. I am on record saying that I believe most of Ethereum's research could and should be absorbed by mainstream academia. I believe critical neutral teams like @ethPandaOps or positions like ACD moderators should be community supported. I believe a smaller EF is better for Ethereum. Perhaps it's unavoidable to cause general discomfort when winding down. But the feeling we get from outside while listening to people inside is that there's more than just discomfort and it touches into disrespect and animosity. I do hope that either I'm entirely wrong in the reading above or if I am partly right, that the upper layers of EF's direction do listen to at least what we, outside, perceive of all this. I hope being part of the EF becomes once again a job that everyone would want to have and that the people that stay working in it do so in a healthy and productive environment.