This was always (well, long enough) a part of the plan and openly communicated. Dropping or changing difficulty bomb does not depend on the EF or the client sof

This was always (well, long enough) a part of the plan and openly communicated. Dropping or changing difficulty bomb does not depend on the EF or the client software maintainers. Dropping or extending it preemptively would be trivial and would have been done already if there weren't consensus to keep it in place. It's in everyone's interest that nodes stay up to date if the network is to evolve and without it there would probably be a couple of years more until the merge that is scheduled for next month. The first difficulty bomb was never set with the intention that this would be the move to PoS. It's a conscious choice to introduce regular hard forks in order to keep the protocol and network evolving. It looks very likely that some percentage of node operators and miners will patch out the bomb this time, which will result in the PoW side of the fork staying alive. Which side of the chain retains monetary value in their tokens is up to social consensus. It will probably differ from protocol to protocol. So far industry and most major exchanges have been aligned with the rest of the Ethereum community here. What you're saying is mostly correct but seems taken out of context. I've only ever seen people looking in from the outside have strong opinions on this particular point, not from the actual stakeholders involved.