Even apart from the totally ludicrous conflict of interest issues in witnesses who are voted in by Freedom deciding to fork out other ninja-mined stake because it might be used to choose witnesses...
Does nobody who runs this chain understand how a blockchain works? If something truly dastardly were ever done by the new owners of the Steemit Inc. stake, the witnesses could always choose to fork by restarting the chain from the preceding block. Nobody has to prepare for it ahead of time.
You might lose the support of exchanges by doing it that way, I suppose, when they would ignore this method. But if that's the real concern here then hiding it in the background while making arguments that have no technical standing is basically fraudulent.
This is an effort to avoid that.
We don't want a fork, but we don't want a master, either.
If ned sold those steem as fully vested with voting rights then that was fraudulent based on past assurances given by ned.
If you have evidence of freedom being a Steemit insider or otherwise making statements about how that account was going to be used, please bring it forward because I haven't seen it. I have my suspicions for sure, but one can hardly blame the witnesses for not considering suspicions alone to be enough to mean anything.
Also, as a practical matter, nothing can be done about the existing freedom votes with a soft fork.