A github issue appeared suggesting code has been written to for a hardfork to remove SteemIt, Inc's stake.
This is incorrect. A pull request was issued (to a mysterious fork which may exist just for that purpose) inappropriately as a means of making a feature request. There's no code to accomplish this behind it. The author appears to be hoping someone will show up to implement it.
In English: purely a publicity stunt.
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.
Thanks for clearing that up.