Most of the antidilution gang are Chinese which caused a lot of communication problems. Their English was bad and they just couldn't articulate their points or plans so clearly that other people would have understood them. That prevented the community from making any coherent plans that everybody could stand and act for. The system got paralyzed.
There were lots of great lessons to learn. Decentralization is not a miracle drug that makes everything magically better. It makes cooperation and decision making much harder and that can cause serious harm for a project.
I'm not sure what would be the best way to get Bitshares rising again, I haven't been following what's happening in there. Now that Dan is working on a new platform, I'll wait and see what it will be about. If it's a general smartcontract platform that can easily implement financial contracts, it might make sense to use it to replace Bitshares.
Wow! I have been looking for answers for the reason behind Bitshares problems for months now. No one was brave enough to explain it like @samupaha did here.
So, I thank you very much, @samupaha. And I thank @lukestokes for openning the subject.
BTW, I know I am writing this 5 months after the article was published, but it seems that the same problems mentioned here are still valid.
This comment has received a 5.40 % upvote from @bellyrub thanks to: @sadekj.