I don't know if you intend this, but when I read this, I sense that the implication is that a take off will probably be soft, given that the people with the most experience think so.

However, this could be an effect of bias: the people who have spent the most time working on software projects see how hard it is (for humans), and so predict that AI improvement will be very hard (recalcitrance high). For the people who have worked the the industry, the hardness of the problem is very available, but the intelligence and optimization power of of the AI is not, since no one has seen a strong AI yet. So they extrapolate from what they know, even though this misses the point of recursive-self-improvement.

Of course, this is saying that one group has a clear grasp of one of the two relevant variables (recalcitrance and optimization power) while the other group has a clear grasp of neither variable...and it's the first group that's biased.