Daniel accomplished a lot and I am thankful for it. I am also very happy about his decision to step down because it hopefully prevents splitting the community.
Absolutely the right call. Wishing him all the best.
Side note: Maybe a community split would've led to builds for more devices, which I would like. While of course you can't guarantee perfect security, you can be pretty sure it'll be better than the alternatives. I'm also surprised that the Play Services sandboxing hasn't been ported to other mainstream Android distributions yet.