Theymos, for someone who touts the importance of decentralization above all else, your level of hypocrisy by allowing yourself to play such a central role in the crypto community simply because you were the first to jump major discussion mediums is quite astounding.
Take a look at the interesting and worthwhile developments of the past 5 years, and not just the few your buddies throw their weight behind.
We've built blockchains that are interoperable, language agnostic, free to use, highly scalable, highly secure (in some instances- more secure than Bitcoin)... the list goes on. Some of these are unpolished, like Grin (which you concede), but others are running as well oiled machines. Is there any argument behind your point of view besides ignorance of how the space has changed in the latter half of the decade? "I'm Theymos so I am right" only works so many times.
Occasionally in other cases I might have an attitude of, "I'm doing it this way because I'm convinced that I'm right. If I'm wrong, show me."
That's the core of the problem. You run the two largest communities in the space. Allowing yourself to unilaterally make decisions on behalf of these communities is a MASSIVE point of centralization that I don't think you would be fine with if the person running the show wasn't you. We saw Grin jump from $3 to over $200 on this announcement. I understand you may not have made this decision to influence the price of the coin, but the reaction is inevitable. What if you are wrong about Grin or you threw your support by some other project that turned out to be a scam? If someone needs to first show you that you made a wrong call and threw the weight of Bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin behind that call, it's already too late.