Tom, not to lead a long dialogue, answer a simple question. Do you have the ability to change the algorithm yourself? Yes or no?
Yes, of course, I have the abilities to change the algo myself.
To make my life easier, I could even wait for some other project based on Zcash to change the algo, and then backport their changes.
But simply following zcash's direction is easiest (and in my opinion most correct) approach.
Those ASIC machines released by Bitmain are in no way comparable to the power of bitcoin's ASICs, Z9 provides only ~4x advantage over GPUs, so I do not really understand why are people so overreacting.
-Tom