> I am really confused, I thought the fork wasn’t because of a bug so much as because somebody stole a lot of ETH and you were trying to make it right?

I am only one voice (and I was in no way at all connected to The DAO) but my support for the hard fork, that surgically excised the The DAO cancer and returned ETH to the token holders of record before the attack, was based on the fact that on such a young, evolving platform, having a very large percentage of ETH in the hands of a potentially malicious actor could subject the developers of the platform to enormous distraction for a long time. That amount of ETH could all be spent on DoS attacks for months or years and the cat and mouse game of chasing attackers through splits would be another painful drain of energy. In addition, such a large perceived theft could draw even more energy draining attention from otherwise productive personnel to explain themselves in various contexts. The subsequent (now thwarted) DoS attacks support this conclusion. Can you imagine what a difficult scenario Ethereum developers would be facing if a malicious attacker, who did not care about profits (e.g. a smart Bitcoin maximalist), had near unlimited funds to wreak havoc on the platform.

> I get it, I want justice too but can we really say that the Ethereum platform is truly decentralized when a central authority can simply revise history when it isn’t convenient for them?

It was not about justice for me. I and most devs I spoke with felt that the blame and teaching signal pain should lie with the developers and promoters of the scheme, as well as the investors. But after much discussion, we were swayed to the notion that this was potentially and existential threat to the still immature decentralized application platform we were all building and building on.

There is no central authority in the Ethereum ecosystem. The Ethereum foundation does next generation platform research, and pays to maintain the reference client and some tooling. The ecosystem is becoming VERY decentralized: EF, start-ups, huge tech/sw firms, banks, finance/investment firms, accounting and consulting firms, energy companies, resource companies, governments, humanitarian groups, …. Ethereum is genuinely of the people, by the people and for the people.

The decision, after long spirited debate, to offer the ecosystem the option of taking the hard fork involved the collection of signals from 5 major stakeholder groups:

miners (including pools)

exchanges

general community (reddit and other voices)

devs (many individual voices)

the Ethereum Foundation (mostly silent on the issues to enable discussion by other actors and gather information regarding social consensus)

Early and sustained signaling, surfaced in various ways (e.g. votes, pools voting, discussions among exchanges), indicated that the 4 groups above (excluding the EF) were favoring the hard fork with about an 85% majority right up to the hard fork block (and it seemed like exchanges were at 100%). And since some miners and exchanges decided to rush the minority baby fork to intensive care and make sure it continued breathing, Classic survived.

Developers, many or most of whom did not like the idea of the hard fork, nevertheless built the option into clients so that the community could decide by downloading the client and selecting the hard fork or no hard fork option. The hard fork was a very broadly community supported event.