The way I understand it, NXT would be prunable subject to paying whatever fees the fNXT nodes required. So if there are many successful childchains, NXT could simply get priced out and then pruned away. There does not seem to be any provision to guarantee archival nodes will always be there.
Also, NXT goes from having exclusive rights to all the new features to non-exclusive. If any of you are familiar with intellectual property and the difference between exclusive and non-exclusive, you know how important it is. It is hard to quantify, might be 2x or 10x or 100x, depends on specific scenario. In no scenario does demoting NXT to child chain benefit NXT.
If there are no significant child chains, then all this chaos is for nothing.
The security model for childchains cannot be evaluated until more details are known and even then having a track record of 2+ years vs 0 months, will make childchains security not as strong as fNXT security, even if mathematically they are identical.
Now, how important is security to an asset investor? Of course, very important.
1 + 1 = 2
I dont think many people will debate me about that.
NXT 2.0 + fNXT = NXT
Let us assume the value of the two is the same. the NXT after 2.0 + fNXT vs current NXT. As I wrote above NXT2.0 is not worth as much as NXT, impossible to know exactly how much less, but it is significant, especially since the expectation of future grown goes to childchain and fNXT, with NXT left behind. And clearly fNXT has value, possible the majority of value if the expectations are that childchains are going to be significant.
Now remember that the price of ALL assets and MS coins are cut the moment of the hard fork by the ratio of old value vs new value and the liquidity on the fNXT side is effectively locked away with the 100NXT/tx fee.
So in addition to looking at an immediate loss of 50%, beyond that it could get worse in the event the value of NXT is below half the combined NXT2.0+fNXT.
The fNXT issuing protects the holders of NXT and its price will probably increase leading up to the fNXT hardfork, which appears to already be fully decided based on the posts I see. However if assets and MS are immediately losing half the price and long term without any mechanism to recover it, this is basically a wealth transfer of the 50% magnitude. If anybody is wondering why asset issuers and investors are upset, hopefully my post will open your eyes.
It is one thing to just change the API and upset third party developers, after all coders are so easy to find, who cares about losing developers. And long time sites that couldnt financially justify the development costs to retool for a new API, who needs those anyway.
I am speaking as a businessman, investor and asset issuer. Areas that I have proven skills in, but it probably doesnt matter that I understand business, financing, and issuing assets. I also had proven skills in the tech side all my warnings about the API issues were ignored. However in the asset area I created more asset values that everybody else combined for quite a while and that includes not just NXT but all decentralized platforms. And I did that in a span of just over a year.