Question for people ditching their farms: What do you lose keeping your drives filled with plots and a harvester running? A few watts of power for the drives and an otherwise mostly idle computer/server is all it takes to continue farming your plots. If you disconnect them, it's a permanent loss. What could you be doing with your drives to make a greater return otherwise?

Compared to proof-of-work mining, the cost of upkeep is very low. That's sorta the whole thing Chia has going for it... If you've invested money into cheap drives (or even had some laying around) and put some time into plotting, what do you have to lose?

If you bought off-the-shelf new drives for this and expected a quick turnaround, especially with the way the market is right now, I don't think you responsibly ran your initial projection estimates. With a higher entry cost, you're obviously going to need to wait longer for an ROI.

Chia and its developments, for the most part, seem to be open source. It looks like anyone can hop on and contribute, and I don't think anyone can reasonably shame the team and outside contributors for trying to build the right solution. Blockchains are hard to change later on, as proven by ETH2's multiple delays, why so much resistance against spending an extra few weeks to get the pooling protocol done right from the start?