Luke says that “How you choose to split up the reward, is irrelevant to mining being decentralized” that’s exactly opposite Ocean is the central server that coordinates the coinbase split and sends it to all the miners connected to their server. Without Ocean you are no longer pool mining because ocean is the server that every miner is relying on for the split. Any pool with client/server architecture (including OCEAN or Stratumv2) can just reject your templates or refuse to include you in the coinbase before you even find a block. To decentralize anything you first have to remove the central point of control. If I am mining on Sv2 or DATUM pool and they reject my template, how has template construction been decentralized?

the block goes directly to the network from the miner via their own node. have you really not looked into how datum works?

because miners are the ones making the templates. it's as simple as that. decentralized reward coordination is a separate issue and utterly irrelevant to Bitcoin, regardless it is being figured out but it is extremely difficult to manage in a scalable way.

a lot of ocean hate is straight up people just not learning how it works.