You're absolutely right that the early distribution as it occurred does cause some problems on the scales of a social platform. Not all of the actors from that period are good or bad specifically, but it's created some really weird power dynamics.

I'm not part of the "secret slack" and the amount of communication that goes on in private venues when we have a permissionless blockchain for communicating is disturbing to me.

Yeah, you'd think a better solution for accountability would exist at this point. Unfortunately Slack, which is permissioned and very controlled, has far better communication tools than what we have on Steem today. That to me is the primary reason - it's hard to use Steem to talk about this stuff, unless you write massive blog posts that take almost 3 days to write :)