From what I've seen elsewhere he appointed ~80% of the voting cardinals so there's a better chance than usual that new pope will be at least relatively liberal.

I kind of want the next one to be a traditional African Roman Catholic partly to mix it up a bit, and partly because it fucks with racists.

Yeah, there's always a lot of flex in social movement. The harder you push, the further you get; but unless the system resilient enough to most adapt, it snaps, or it rebounds. Neither of which is a reliable form of change.

To me, once lives are no longer on the line on the big scale, it's better to ease up and push for change gently from the bottom up rather than forcefully from the top down.

It doesn't fix problems as fast, but once they get fixed, the populace's inertia will serve up keep the changes as the status quo. Since the kind of changes that Francis was making were the kind that work from the bottom up, despite him being a power, I look at his changes as the result of the work already done, rather than something that was supposed to be the vanguard of change.

But, like you said, moving slow means that there's going to be people getting ground down by the system as it exists. Even once you get past the point where people are dying frequently by way of violence or gaps in the system, there's still going to be death, and suffering, until things change completely. But if you don't slow down once that goal is met, the serious enemies of humane change will fight harder and nastier.

You end up with a worse situation overall by pushing until a system breaks. You get the crazies making desperate moves instead of being gradually worn away.