I hate to say this, but I think STINC calls this fork a success because it was for them.

This has been my suspicion for a while now, looking back at the last several hard forks. It seems to me that they have been setting up a way that they can maximize the profits from their ninja-mined stake rather than use that stake for the purposes of development, marketing, and onboarding new users as they had originally stated it would be used.

The ninja-mine has always been one of the largest attack vectors against the Steem blockchain, and instead of addressing this by doing something reasonable (since they are clearly not using it as "promised"), they are leveraging it to further enrich themselves by selling/delegating that stake, by creating Resource Credits that can potentially be bought/sold in a marketplace, and by not having to spend that stake on new user onboarding.

So, the development has been shoddy, the marketing is non-existent (and there is no marketing team at all, as far as I know), and the onboarding can essentially be free for them. In light of this...why did/do they need that massive ninja-mined stake that has caused so many issues both within and outside the Steem community?

The push for SMTs just seems like more centralized development for a vision that, to me, will likely be destructive for the blockchain.