The troubling thing I still see is people assume inactive/passive investors even want to become/have the time to be active ones in the first place.

Chance are many of inactive/passive just delegate and only check in quarterly or monthly to ensure payments are still flowing. At best they might have someone managing a crypto fund for them charging a flat fee which would not cover the costs of manual curation. It’s not like they are going get a physical letter mailed to their house explaining HF21 by Steemit LLC or the owners of the bot they have delegated to.

Then you have the mind-numbing time consuming and troubling issue of trying to distribute those kinds of votes the large accounts have. If an investor can afford $1 million high-risk investment (which is what this is) chances are it’s not a very large amount of their total wealth or they are able to recover quite quickly if it ends in a total loss. Which means this is not a lot money to them regardless of what curation is paid.

Unless they are high risk-taking junkies in which case I don’t see them being inactive/passive with such an investment when they can shape the landscape to a certain degree and have fun doing so. Either case purely investing for dividends and forgoing the impacts on the initial principal amount is a sure way to end broke. We keep acting like curation dividends is a magic bullet that will fix everything.

An active investor with millions in influence wanting to maximize profit would make their own dapp/partner with others and use it to push users towards it. Not with the goal of earning dividends paid out via curation. Rather massively increase their principal investment entirely. Not to mention I would not be shocked if several projects on the blockchain would already have an evaluation in the millions to tens of millions of dollars if someone wanted to buy them out. Far greater than what their current SP is or what it will earn them in any reasonable amount of time.

End of the day Witness are more or less acting like they don’t have a choice if they wish to remain a Witness. It’s time for everyone else to find ways to adapt to the future landscape. That is after all what we should expect from game theory.