So, after a full day and a lot of back and forth, a few very important things have come to light. I'll try to summarize them here because I've been posting primarily in the Bad Places® rather than the Good Places™, so that nobody's lost.

- It looks like somebody from inside the Rust Project, but not with the consensus of all leadership, tried to downgrade my talk (or perhaps have it outright retracted) because they did not like the direction the compile-time work I was doing. (Learned from: https://www.jntrnr.com/why-i-left-rust/)
- The decision to downgrade my talk, once it was known I was going to talk about Compile-Time Reflection in Rust, came anywhere from 4 to 8 days before I was actually told this past Friday and had to release the blog post stepping away. However, as evidenced by much of the public statements from existing, ex, and now-ex Rust Project members, the decision to unilaterally downgrade was not known to many of them until they read my post.
- Downgrading the keynote was NEVER voted on like inviting me to do the keynote in the first place.

All in all, this reeks of someone trying to run-around the consensus of the Rust Project because they don't like Shepherd Oasis's or my work (detailed here: https://soasis.org/posts/a-mirror-for-rust-a-plan-for-generic-compile-time-introspection-in-rust/).

I don't know how to handle this going forward. The Rust Project has effectively ultimate commit rights to rustc and all of the projects our work would touch are under the control of the organization that did this. Even if we do the work, they could effectively unwind and undo a lot of our work, or indefinitely block it with an endless slew of "reasonable concerns" from ranking project members who seem to have problems but don't want to communicate them except by taking potshots at the status of my now-gone RustConf talk.

I don't know what to do. I'm pretty lost, it's Sunday, and I have a shitload of things I still need to do, not including this whole trainwreck.