You know, the question of "intent" is really big and really important – and even after having read the white paper and the blue paper, a couple of years of random discussion from creators and those involved, and getting elbow deep in the ugly, messy, red and gooey guts of it all, I don't think I actually understand anymore than you do.

And if I am remembering the discussion you're referring to, a good chunk of my perplexity could be tracked back to the fact that it was obvious that the mechanisms in place would lead to exactly the kinds of behavior and activity that we are being told is undesirable. If you look at my comments on the proposed content of hardfork 20, you'll see exactly the same thing.

I am currently scrolling some very pretty pictures of the network of delegation transfers for the last week. If I can make this graph turn out to be tolerably readable, I will go the extra mile and see if I keep double the number of transfers that are being visualized.

In the process, I'm doing what I can to cut out the big, obvious bots and major services on the platform. That step alone is probably unnecessary, but it's interesting. Even looking at some of the preliminary, quite broken imagery I can see major islands of activity forming with very strong centroids. That's the sort of thing that you simultaneously really want and dread to see, because after the filtering, what you have left are supposedly non-bots.

Research continues.