I'm hoping the entire concept of a token swap and killing off Steem is cancelled. Forever.
I'm hoping that with time, and growth alongside the community, he sees that it's better for everyone if Steem is left to remain independent and off Tron.
Connecting the two in other fashions is a different thing entirely, and there could be many ways in which it can benefit us.
As you mentioned, the token swap and move to Tron is clearly still the long-term plan, but I'm hopping we can change his mind on that and show him why.
Unfortunately, a merge with Tron makes sense. There's no point developing two different chains when they can focus on one and leverage its network effects. The other option is just leaving Steem as is, but then it's going to keep going on the slow death spiral it has been on since 2017. So the best option for the survival of Steem is still merging with Tron in some fashion and leveraging their investments and network effects.
This might turn into quite a long comment, sorry, haha.
I'm unsure about the first part for one main reason: surely Tron already had the resources (people and funding) to create their own token system which is similar to Steem. They could've built something from that ground up that could've rivalled Steem in many ways. An interesting question to have from this is whether Tron actually needs us, or if we need them.
I feel the answer is quite even. They probably need us as much as we need the investment and PR. This brings me to the next part:
It obviously entirely depends on what's planned, but having two separate chains could be mutually beneficial. With existing users on Steem, building this chain and finding ways to connect Steemit's front-end to Tron could grow two individual market caps in an industry that's largely sticking to individual ones. Take their acquisition of BitTorent and the implementation of a TRC10 token: it's practically dead.
With Steem not becoming a TRC shittoken and remaining independent (ignoring minor features that connect to Tron and its ecosystem in some way, strictly referring to independence as Steem staying on its own chain) then Justin has the leverage to push one positive over the negatives from a marketing aspect. It also allows for a plethora of announcements that benefit both chains.
Another thing that comes to attention is that surely there'd be little point in releasing more features to Steem: communities, SMTs, etc, if the plan is to ultimately kill it off and start from scratch.
I do have a few more things that could be said, but I think I'll just throw in some bullet points. With one final thing: I think Justin isn't entirely aware as to what he now owns. I think he has a rough idea, but not one large enough to fully understand what it's capable of and who really is in control. Those are questions the community is asking as well.
There's no way to sugarcoat this - Tron is a massive, $1.5 billion project, hovering in and around the top 15. Meanwhile, Steem is a failing project that has dropped from the top 10 to barely hanging on to top 100. Indeed, were it not for the Tron acquisition rumours, it'd have dropped out EOY 2019. I have noticed way overinflated opinion of Steem by bagholders, and its frankly delusional. In the wide crypto community, Steem is universally thought of as a once promising project that is failing through mismanagement and poor development. So, yeah, the answer is Tron >>>>>>> Steem, it's not even close.
Steem will be integrated intro Tron, though the timing and nature of it remains uncertain. I bet it's going to take a couple of years, but they'll figure it out. I'm not entirely familiar with Tron, but one thing's for sure, they have an order of magnitude more developers than Steemit Inc ever did.