I know most of the stuff that has happened since HF22.1 has been staged like a bad movie.

Burning the coins would have made Steem more useful for people with less Steem Power including new users.

In my opinion, Proof-of-Stake consensus favors people with a lot of coins too much compared to people who are just trying to start using Steemit. Changing the reward curve and implementing minimum reward a while back made it even harder for new users to get any rewards. For them, Steemit is no better than blogging and social networking platforms that pay no rewards at all to anyone.