IMO, This post just has a click-baity title with almost no information within. TheDAO is a failure. There are a few of the other Ethereum DAOs like Augur, Digix and Maker have invested a lot of effort over the last one year and haven't launched yet to iron out issues like these. They didnt need to learn such expensive lessons. Maker Market contracts were hit by the same bug and they handled it very elegantly three days back.
TheDAO was convoluted from the beginning(code, incentives, purpose), and a lot of us within Ethereum were highly skeptical too but when mainstream media started covering it, our voices got drowned.
> to tweet, blog and bloviate their hindsight-informed opinions
If you think these are merely hindsight-informed opinions, you weren't paying attention when people were saying the same thing as foresight-informed opinions.
There's a good chance that all funds will be returned (thanks in no small part to the fact that the siphoned ether can't be moved on for several weeks, so that was a fortunate design decision).
The media love bad news. It's up to us to combat that negative spin.
Sorry, I think your point is completely invalid after reading "I don’t view TheDAO as a failure. I view it as an experiment that has reached its conclusion.". If you go to a doctor and he/she tries to cure from cancer giving orange juice he/she can't argue it was an experiment because this is malpractice.
The DAO was not scrutinized enough comparing to the funds it contained.
This is a really sloppy article - and I and many others disagree with your premise. You don't have to put this much money at risk to innovate, and failures like this have the potential to set the space back years (regulation may increase, consumers will be very wary).
Nearly every engineer who launches a product goes through a staged rollout with testing along the way (including the Ethereum network which took years to develop and test, and likely still has many undiscovered bugs). When the costs of failure are high (any financial services product, software at NASA, embedded software), this is especially important. DAO innovation could have been served by draft contracts passed around in the community, or a small POC with small deposits or toy money, as the design was worked out - and refined over months, and yes, even years.
Releasing a DAO contract (and marketing it, curating it), without any limitations on funding or substantial due diligence, was problematic at best - and gives a black eye to everyone who exercises due diligence in the space.
TheDAO was convoluted from the beginning(code, incentives, purpose), and a lot of us within Ethereum were highly skeptical too but when mainstream media started covering it, our voices got drowned.