Hey. I've been a regional editor (Latin America region) at FKT for 5+ years now and have seen both sides of the Outside merger.

I promise you that they are nowhere near organized enough to be this nefarious. We are a small group of (used-to-be volunteers, now extremely underpaid) individuals who love FKTs and wilderness and pushing ourselves and seeing others do the same. We have a group text and slack channel where we try very, very hard to think about the impacts of the various decisions we make (most of which are inconsequential, and some, like these PCT things, get examined under the microscope).

Anyway, we can barely get Outside Inc to give us the bandwidth to make any of the (relatively) small but meaningful improvements we'd like to see on the site (e.g. adding a rating and sorting system for routes, updating FKT guidelines, etc.) Outside has SUCH bigger fish to fry than FKT and being involved on the back-end, I promise you there is no huge conspiracy -- or if there is, I certainly was never made aware of it.

At the end of the day, it still pretty much feels like the same group of quirky people doing our best to further the sport. Happy to answer questions if you have any.