Yeah, we were at a early stage negotiating a merger to acquire more developer resources, but the proposal was leaked beforehand and both communities
denied it. We decided to call it off completely and solved the lack of resources differently.
One year later the team of Dash is larger than ever.
can you clarify what you meant by the bolded?
I think the references you quoted are already a good starting point to get an idea how both communities reacted back then: we had a shitstorm in both, DRK and SDC, threads and it was quite obvious that the majority of the communities was against the merger.
Looking back we were a bit naive, thinking we could merge communities like you merge git repos. Lesson learned, moved on.