But what concerns me most is that these gold nuggets we call long term thinkers within community not only will be upset by these changes, but will potentially have theor energy turned against steem.

Only long term thinkers that don't understand how steemit works will be upset since the new changes will reduce the inflation slightly on steem power holders, so they will benefit from such change.

to the original model that brought is to a 400 mil marketcap

You know how many BTC brought the market cap to these levels? About 600 BTC. Basically when there is no liquidity you can shoot the price up very easily with very little money but it is a false representation which is why it went back to it's pre spike level.
In a healthy system you would have price consolidation phases, which means the price will find a bottom higher than where it started, from there it would go higher and so on, thats how a real marketcap builds up.