Excellent post and queries, meno and well worth considerable thought.
The intentions of the creators are not relevant to me at all...It's only the health of the child which should be considered. How is the child being raised and nurtured? With vacuous grandiloquence? With being taught to ignore crucial political and religious argumentation? By shadow banning the queries of other children if the parent thinks the questions are too dangerous to be considered?
Anyway, the algorithms of crypto, in general, seem suspect to me so I don't hold out much hope for them as being the soteriological white knight that many on the trending page assert; which is why I don't bother with that page often.
But I enjoy Steemit and have met some very cool and thoughtful people:), and my personal hope for Steemit or a website like it would be for it to be a type of basic income dividend where the reward pool was more egalitarian and less prone to the casino ethos.
There might be a lot of people that think like you Andrew... its probably crucial to the success of the platform that in the future the inner workings of the technology are something the average user does not need to worry about. When internet gave it's first step the online world was only for the highly technical users, and we know it now to be the case.
I've also enjoyed my time on Steemit, and have me made some good friends. Its because of this second experience we share that I would like for them to stay and thrive.
I would like you to thrive, you have a lot of brain food to share and of course some rocking tunes as well!