Solana is proposed Alpenglow consensus upgrade major improvement or major risk?

Most of the discussion around Solana still seems to focus on price action, but the infrastructure changes being proposed are arguably more interesting. The upcoming Alpenglow upgrade would replace the current consensus components (Proof-of-History and TowerBFT) with a new design built around Votor and Rotor. From what’s been described so far, the system introduces two finality paths: a fast path that reaches finality with ~80% validator agreement in a single round a slower path that can finalize with ~60% agreement across two rounds The goal is extremely fast finality — reportedly around ~150 ms, which is approaching traditional payment network latency. The design is also supposed to support around 2,000 validators while tolerating situations where roughly 20% of nodes are malicious and another ~20% are offline at the same time. If everything goes according to plan, deployment is being discussed for around the first half of 2026 alongside updates to the Agave client after further testing. Replacing the core consensus mechanism of a live chain is obviously a huge change though. Curious how people here see it: Is a full consensus swap like this impressive engineering progress, or does it introduce too much risk for a live network?