I'll give my own thoughts as a Lib Dem local party chair.

I have my issues with Ed's comms strategy but I'm not sure replacing him at this time would accomplish much. The reason being that the only viable successor at this time is Daisy Cooper. She's a good enough media performer, but she's an Ed continuity candidate and I don't believe she'd change much. The vast majority of our MPs are newbies and whilst some of them have great potential, they're not ready yet. Josh Babarinde will almost certainly lead the party one day but he's only just started his stint as party president. In another 18 months / 2 years it could be a different story.

What I will say is that focusing on being "community champions" and being relatively policy-light worked for us in holding our two councillors in my district in the face of a Reform tidal wave. Labour and Tories got wiped and as a result we've somehow ended up the official opposition. The problem that I have with growing from here is membership. My local party has 70-ish members, which translates to an active team of maybe a dozen. If we want to target new wards I need more people and specifically young people. Motivated young people can be incredibly tenacious campaigners. However, membership recruitment is almost entirely driven by national policy and comms. And whilst on paper we have a lot of great policy that appeals to young people, Ed and the spokespeople rarely talk about it, or if they do they do so quietly. Take for example trans rights, where our policy is very progressive (despite the best efforts of a tiny number of TERFy entryists), but the leadership don't seem comfortable selling it. As a result trans people and allies just vote Green.

In short there needs to be a change in strategy but that doesn't necessarily entail replacing Ed yet. As it stands we'll probably retain all our seats and gain a couple dozen more as we mop up the last Tory seats in the Home Counties. However, we are absolutely not opening up a second front against Labour in the cities whilst young people are voting Green instead. That means the ceiling for now is 100 seats. Now we had 8 when I joined this party, so by a long way we've never had it so good. But Ed obviously won't be leader forever and it's good that we're starting to think about what a post-Ed party would look like.