There are many possible scenarios indicated by the language that Dan has used to describe his relationship with HAL. I personally think he has at least some coding ability, and potentially lots, but we do know that he outsources a large amount of his coding. Dan repeatedly made statements like "I didn't code for HAL", which may very well be true statements. There exsits many possibilities in between where he could have still developed for HAL, but outsourced the actual coding. Prometheus mentioned that Dan 'took the HAL anon to another level', he may have designed it and had Christian Howe code it. He may have not done that, and simply worked with Promethus on a strictly theoretical level, outlining the tech while Prometheus paid his own man to code it(although the 'Dan's coin' talk from both Prom and Coinada makes this seem less likely). So while there are many different scenarios that might have taken place - and we're obviously not going to be getting the full truth anytime soon - either Prom and Coinada are lying about Dan's involvement in HAL, or Dan had some level of involvement in it.

If Prom and Coinada are not lying, then was it unethical for Dan to do a code review for HAL?

If Prom and Coinada are lying, and Dan had actually had zero involvement with HAL specifically before the code review ,would it be ethical for him to review HAL's code considering by this time he was already involved with Prometheus?

If this seemingly unlikely course of events look place, it still reflects very poorly on Dan. All of those code reviews did. Even when we as a community naively assumed that he was in fact an unbiased third party. The community at large certainly did not know about his connection with Prometheus. If you think that would have been ignored after reading the XC thread where multiple members put forth the belief that XC was somehow different and not associated with the shady underground of altcoins, then you weren't paying attention. The XC echo chamber shielded many of those community members from the true opinions of people, but I can guarantee you that you could mention XC on any trollbox or non XC thread and hear some real opinions about XC and Dan Metcalf. If you think I'm lying, I'd advise you to try it sometime posing as someone making a legit inquiry about XC and watch the reactions you get.

I've been following XC since the 500k bubble. To say that the community at large hasn't widely considered XC to be shady would be either a lie at worse and ignorant at best. Everything from the loljosh clone launch, to the defense of Jasinlee, to the closed source and moderated threads, and then the kiss of death code reviews gave XC and Dan one of the worst reputations among people in the community not directly involved in pump groups(who if course couldn't care less about ethics). The code reviews specifically - even before all of these new revelations about the Promethus connection - were already widely considered desperate and damaging to Dan's personal reputation. There's a reason he's not going to be doing code reviews anymore. And it's certainly not the thousands of dollars he was receiving that's making him stop, he knew what kind of lasting damage they were doing.

You and Dan a use a similar strategy of replying 'which is it, Dan can't code, or Dan is the lead developer for HAL? Dan is Prometheus, or am I Wolong now?' attempting to avoid the points by taking speculations from other people which are irrelevant to the current point and attempting to use them to make peoples specific unrelated arguments seem absurd. I can tell you are close to XC and Dan, for a while I thought you might be Dan himself, I'm not sure. Doesn't really matter though.

Without the FUD meme that's been used to brainwash XC supporters in to ignoring even the slightest consideration of evidence, or even question things with some basic critical thinking skills, would XC even be around today? Debate and discussion that could even just potentially imply some negativity towards XC is outlawed, and the results are kind of amazing. The true believers are seemingly immune to even questioning any idea that might result in XC being negatively impacted. It's on a level that I've never seen before in altcoins and it's actually kind of fascinating. The only thing that gives me some pause is that a lot of these true believers are actually sock puppets, but I'm pretty sure that I can tell there are still a significant amount of legit individuals. I'd like to see how long XC can keep this thing going. Price will likely have little effect on people now as most will already consider it not worth the damage to their ego to sell their bag, and it's XC's specialty to sell followers on the idea of green pastures just around the corner. But as the financial incentive goes away for the XC team, the effort that it takes to maintain the community delusion will begin to fade. XC isn't going to magically become a successful altcoin now, especially not after this. It's just question of when it will finally fade away.

My conclusion after trying to converse and reason with some XC/Blocknet supporters is that there are 3 4 possibilities:
1.  They refuse to look at the details and question them because they are afraid of what it may mean for their investment
2.  They have looked at the details, but are really that naive and do not understand the implications of the information that have come to light
3.  They have looked at the details and understand the implications, but do not care that the people behind it are unethical (i.e. knowingly supporting the scam)
4.  They are sock puppet accounts