There was no 'feature request'. An independent dev did in fact create a pull request on his own repo, but it was apparently done for discussion purposes, arguably what might be referred to as trolling.
That Steemit immediately responded to that with a knee jerk reaction of starting powering down all of their stake without even talking to anyone or considering whether such a fork were remotely likely or even possible speaks volumes.
Now to be honest I don't blame them for acting to protect their stake, however it would make little difference given a 13 week process to spend a little time assessing the situation before going off to the nuclear option of powering it all down.
I think it's likely they've been wanting to do this for months and this looked like a plausible excuse, assuming that there's any causal relationship at all.
That could be. It is interesting that ned did the same with his personal account long before any of this troll fork stuff.