Wish you big success making magical products, and glad you all are working in this space and finding traction. It's heartening.

A few additional scattered thoughts / details. I'm a bit at a loss for how to talk about this — Steve is very good at smiling for the camera (so to speak) while being very candid with his thoughts in private, so forgive me if some of this lacks diplomacy. Several times throughout the year, Steve reached out to me with the same thoughts and feelings he shared today in that thread and in his goodbye post above — (paraphrasing and filtering out heaps of negativity), "I am disappointed with the discussions here in this community. Nobody here has vision, and nobody is willing to criticize my work. I have invested a lot of my time and have not received enough value in return. I think I'm going to leave." Each time, I tried to talk to him about why he felt this way, offer him some of the very direct feedback he asked for (doing my best to focus on the work, keep it actionable, do critique rather than mere criticism). He seemed to appreciate it, and respond well to the energy of it. But none of the substance of my comments ever seemed to make it through — exactly like what you see in that thread from today. It wasn't what he wanted to hear, so he didn't hear it. (As an illustrative example: early on in the thread today, he asked us to tell him if his explanation was unclear. Multiple people responded saying this is unclear... and here's my best effort at what I think it is. He responded with frustration at the best-effort guesses, never offering any clarity. This is exactly the pattern that played out in all my discussions with him.) Every time he reached out to me, I felt as though he was talking to me about these frustrations because he wanted me to make an appeal to him, to prove to him that this community was worth his time. All the while, he'd be quite dynamic and engaging and offer plenty of cheer in public, in contrast to his private frustrations. I got the impression that he wanted me to run this community more like an incubator / accelerator. More activity, more ambition, less concern about hurt feelings, move fast and break things. He has other communities like that. What our community has, that his other ones probably don't, is deep technical / subject expertise. From his post above (emphasis added):

My intention to participate here was to share ideas, join in constructive criticism, and participate in debate which I was hoping would result in finding like minds that would work with our team — in short: recruiting. This may be against the policies of this community (I’m not clear on that) which I’m sorry for crossing the line if people felt I was advertising a product or exclusively looking to recruit.

Addendum — a peek behind the "mod life" curtain that nobody asked for but it helps me to be able to share my feelings, since Steve leaving is, unfortunately, a certain kind of milestone. Now that Steve and Vladimir have left the community, and Edward was formally banned, there are now zero other people who are or ever have been venting frustration to me in private while carrying on merrily participating in the community. If you had asked me near the beginning of the year who I was worried about having to interact with as part of my role as moderator, I would have named only these three people. (Well... okay, two or three more, but those guys stopped posting entirely once we made it crystal clear that it's not permissible to say "It is perfectly normal and good that there are no women in this community".) I've spent way more time talking to Steve, Vladimir, and Edward in private than I have talking about Hest or reading the links people post. That's the cost of being the moderator, and I accept that cost with no reservation. Yes, it's a shame that we've lost their perspectives, and they each made significant positive contributions. But it is just as much a shame that so much energy was sunk into appealing to them, and working with them in private and in public, in an ultimately futile attempt to help them get more out of this community and not insist that we be aggressive, thick-skinned, or selectively apolitical. I'm not sure what additional lessons I can learn by reflecting on this in totality, but I will continue trying, so that when the need again arises I can better do right by all involved. For now, everyone in this community is a pure, unqualified pleasure for me to know and interact with. Yes, even Duncan. This is such a relief.. sadly. I am now looking forward to participating more in the community as a regular ol' member, not just as a moderator. I'm sure there will be other people in the future who find themselves here with some particular axe to grind, and I'll readily be the grindstone. But for now, fingers crossed, I'll be able to interact with ya'll in a more substantial way, focused on futurism rather than absorbing misguided frustrations.