what they should do is, yes, postpone sappling and deal with the ASIC mess right away. Priority should be given to what they said first, which is remain ASIC resistant, alter the algo to eliminate any threat of ASICs... sappling and any other upgrade came after the statements on ASIC resistance and forking off ASICs.
Who the hell are you to decide how they prioritize their work? First of all, there is no ASIC threat or mess. There are just ASICs, which are the natural progression of how coins are mined. ASICs are a good thing to everyone except end users that are worried about nothing more than their profits. Go mine some other shitcoins and stop posting this nonsense before someone actually takes you seriously.
ASICs in their current implementation are not a good thing. I would agree with you in that they would be no different then GPUs but with one exception, currently publicly available ASICs are provided only by one company Bitmain.
We already seen what they did back with Bitcoin and their ASIC boost software giving their own miners a secret advantage (until discovered) over even the hardware they sell off to the public. They have also included kill switch code in their hardware in the past, of course they spin it as it is good "in case someones miner(s) are stolen they can remotely deactivate them", but just the existence of such a feature should be alarming.
No matter what your views this is not leading at all to decentralization of the network and in fact is going more back to centralizing it in the hands of one hardware provider. If there were several ASIC manufacturers who made available and sold new hardware without restrictions or secret access, similar to the GPU manufactures, than yes ASICs would really be no different than GPU mining.
The thing GPU mining offers is that it truly helps to decentralize the mining network as even though we will always have differences of scale regardless of ASIC or GPU, at least the GPU route lets home miners have a foot in the door. With ASICs you have several hurdles to overcome, first you need to be even able to acquire them, you need to keep up with the queen's race game as new hardware is routinely released, you need to often pre-order them months in advance, and often you need to scale up to even make it worthwhile. All these things make ASICs available to far fewer people, thus further reducing the number of miners, or essentially reducing the decentralization of the mining network.