Fantastic points. It’s honestly a real head scratcher that they done this as they did. If they worked with the community for the last 6 months, made note of the mods that were most impactful and either implemented the changes they made or included the mods baked in, in an experimental area that is very much “at your own risk” then they could have avoided the backlash altogether. Have some curated mods that are official provided and only allowed through their channel, so they have complete control and they can’t act as backdoors. Something along those lines would have made this a positive thing overall.
How they react to this will determine a lot. A lot of people hailed VRChat as what they wanted the “metaverse” (sorry to use that term lol) to be and how it felt like the older days of the internet. People pointed at VRChat as an example of how they wanted VR to be and were worried about Meta, Apple or whatever other large corporation coming in and ruining that for everyone but ironically it was the VRC devs themselves that came in and made strides towards dismantling what people held dear.
I do wonder if that HBO documentary today was part of the timing for this, like they knew this wouldn’t be taken well but were hoping that the documentary would somehow overshadow the backlash. Hilariously naive if they did.