Hi @indigoocean,
thank you very much for your feedback on this.
In order to implement such a fundamental change, it would require an update of the Steem software, all witnesses are running. The current version is 0.19.2 - the main release is called HF19 (HF stands for Hardfork because the change in software isn't compatible with older software versions).
So to answer your question, hardforks happend several times a year in the past, so there would be possibilities to push those changes into production.
Afaik the feature scope of the next hardfork (HF20) is already defined and will bring SMT (smart media tokens) and improvements on the account sign up process.
Thank you. I appreciate your taking the time to explain all that.