Well, I'm not swayed. No matter how you dice .. rewards are being taking away which will slow down account growth. Account growth is hard enough as it is.
I believe the deciding factor on Steemits success will be if users can grow accounts organically in a somewhat reasonable time frame. If that's not possible then this place will be forever a niche site.
The average social media outlet user ( FaceBook users / Instagram ect ) are not investing money for SP. There not going to stick around watching whales make hundreds while they make pennies. Sites like FaceBook don't have that issue as everyone is on even playing ground making the same $0.
I agree with you completely on your last 2 paragraphs and have very much been on that side the whole time... And I still am. And frankly the problem is that everyone got fat and happy early and now we have a distribution problem... 90% resides at the very top...
But this particular issue I think they did do the right thing. I was where you were a week ago. It took me many conversations with Carl to get to the point where I get the point. While the money is going away from the post, it is only money that is artificially created by and large... (ie bots or ALT votes).... And so it is disincintivizing early votes by that class.
While I myself have also found that loophole, there is no way that I could ever have expected to catch up to the big boys that could do it with far more money and far more efficiently than me.
I think you will be surprised, but I certainly agree with you about there still being a major gap and an general lack of understanding of how to build a community. I am by no means a fan of management. I simply think this HF 20 isn't the problem at all.