I agree it's harder now than on steem and did make it a point to show that it's fairly easy to break away from a successful attacker- and I think most reasonable people would think it's fine to recover a social network in this way.
But making problems more unlikely doesn't eliminate them, and to date PoW is the only system that can recover from these events without a human, and on top of that you need home users to be able to run their own sovereign full node on as little equipment as possible to achieve "full" censorship resistance & immutability. 51% attacks are mostly just inconvenient. You are supposed to wait 6 blocks for finality on btc, technically
I also agree that the tradeoffs DPOS makes in these areas are fine for it's use case. This is a great platform for a social network and people should use it. It's just not the kind of thing to put your life savings into maybe.
I think we disagree on how easy it might be to socially attack DPOS validators. I have been watching every major US brand, tech giant, social media platform, cable news and newspaper launch a coordinated assault on democracy for the past 4 years. But even this is easily forked away from more cheaply than it would be to pull off. Hive is a very powerful weapon for speech.
Wanted to add this tidbit: Hive has no ninja-mine; the largest holder has 3%. It takes roughly 30%+ to take out the top witnesses now. The exchange attack (Binance, Huobi, Polo) powering up users' funds for 3 months, and using it to overthrow the network has been solved. Any newly powered up stake takes 1 month before it is allowed to vote in governance. Any exchange attack now will not only lock their funds for 4 months if they wish to attack the network, but we would see it from a mile away.
Furthermore, I don't even think you can buy 30% of the liquid Hive in existence if you wanted to. If someone tried to attack, it would make us all very rich; if they were successful, we would be so rich that we could easily have resources to fork again, dump the token the attacker is buying and getting a free airdropped token like last time. Many Hivers doubled their net worth during the hostile takeover, selling their Steem and keeping their Hive for free. Without the ninja-mine, such an attack would be nearly impossible. It's an attack I welcome wholeheartedly.
And running a full node on Hive is easier than ever. It is effortless for anyone to run a full node, so we are very agile and decentralized from the point of entry standing as well. If any witnesses were corrupted (most are anon btw), we would easily see it and either unvote them from consensus quickly or fork the network again. Trying to capture Hive in a centralized way is like trying to catch air with a net. We still have whistleblowers' text on the chain; if governments could remove it, they would have already. Any attack on the network would make Hive go viral, the same way the hostile takeover did. The more you attack us, the stronger and more resilient we are. Hive is 10x more advanced than Steem, which should tell you something about this chain's anti-fragile.