and if Antpool doesn't upgrade to 12.3, what good is any DIP? How are upgrades even useful if people don't upgrade? Why does it take the largest most profitable mining company in the world months to upgrade when I could do it in two days as a non-tech?
You are describing the difference between the update of masternodes versus the update of mining pools,
masternodes tend to upgrade much faster then mining pools. That has been the case with every update
involving a protocol change.
The current update of miners is at 77.3% and is growing slowly :
https://www.dashninja.pl/blocks.htmlhttps://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/#!network
With our previous protocol update from v11 to v12 the same thing happened (miners slow at updating, masternodes updated fast) but after awhile pretty much all the mining pools switched to latest update and the network could safely transition.
I dont see a difference with our previous update, our current update and our next update, just a whole lot of impatient anxiety from new users like you who are unfamiliar with Dash previous updates and the time it generally takes (specially when there is a protocol change involved).
Also remember Antpool is selling Dash ASIC miners, they dont have an incentive to sabotage Dash by not implementing v12.3
