I have my own shopping list of Mastodon features that i watched languish in PRs on GitHub. I like Rochko, but he completely failed to meet the moment of Twitter’s explosion and make the massive flood of excitement about Mastodon into the real permanent gains that were up for grabs.
Most of my wish list have nothing to do with safety because I’m a straight cis white guy and so my experience of Mastodon is that its userbase is painfully anodyne.
But the point stands that a hard fork with a focus on development velocity is long overdue.