Bitshares has too much investment (vested "stake") in proof-of-stake to shift quickly and their small market cap would be overrun well before they could act. Besides I think they believe in their solution. Their coin appears to be more like a cooperative or corporation than a decentralized open source deal. Rather I could see them making tweaks to their own design to try emulate any of the best attributes and I would need to study DPoS in more detail to see where if any limitations for them might lie.
One thing about the Bitshares people is they seem pretty willing to undertake new initiatives and switch direction. If they saw a reason to want to do something different I don't think it would necessarily have to be on the same coin platform at all.
Hey if Daniel is willing to give up all the collectivism crap about shares in MLM, interest bearing accounts, etc (and all that I don't bother to understand about Bitshares), then as a coder I'd explore working with him. I know he is a talented coder. And I see there are other talented coders over there in his community (some guy pulled a Javascript implementation of ECC out of his hat in 30 hours the other day so they can accelerate their web wallet implementation of the new anonymity features).
But alas, I remember from the deep debates I as Anonymint had with Daniel in 2013, that he is inherently socialist and I am inherently anarchist. I recently exhanged a few posts with his brother and still the same attitude difference seems to persist between us. So I think he will always be looking at problems and solutions more top-down than I am. Meaning I will be looking to encourage the market of network effects for development momentum as early as feasible. I'd rather make aspects orthogonal so others can build and profit, rather than try to build my own well contained, feature complete, crypto kingdom as Bitshares Corporation appears to do. Give more opportunities to others.
So I am confident that what ever he does with my designs, he will sufficiently screw them up that I don't have to worry too much.
But let me reserve my final judgement until I complete my evaluation of DPoS to see what he has done technically.
I am more worried about Vitalik (and separately Blockstream and with their significant resources). That guy appears to be a beast of an intellect. Wish I could get him on my team and rein him in to focus sufficiently on achieving realized designs and implementations. Or maybe I should wish he will go to the competitor and tie them up in forever research and R&D.
Look I can't worry about this. I need to code and see where the chips fall. Let everyone do what they will.
Edit: here at 53:30 Daniel explains they are licensing their code:
https://beyondbitcoin.org/bitshares-dev-hangout-bytemaster-stealth-confidential-transactions/
They are building a business model around building software for the coin ecosystem. This is very top-down and non-network effects thinking. It is far too slow. We need 1000s of developers working in an ecosystem not the developers of the coin taking a preferential position crowding out the rest of the potential competition within the ecosytem.
The developers should not be competing with their own ecosystem!!
I am confident the Larimer brothers will screw up despite being technically competent.
Crypto-land requires a very diverse mix of skills.
Edit#2: I was just shaking my head at the end of the audio interview with Daniel. They are paying their community to listen to his interview! How much more top-down micromanager could you possibly be.
I am all about using my brain to make big paradigm shifts and then let the market sweep me away.
Now you all get to observe if there is a significance difference... stay tuned...