Thanks for pointing me at this; I think there's a lot of good sense in here. I don't think of stakeholders in quite the same way and would approach some of it differently, but that's a post this long of its own.

I would disagree with your Business Favorability score, though; I think in a lot of ways Monsters is the perfect business for Steem as it has been for the last six months, and that might be leading you to give it a higher score than it deserves. Your model allows you to make excellent use of the community, you aren't sufficiently tied to the voting economy that you have to care that someone's constantly trying to redesign it, and as a top witness you're not on the outside looking in at an extremely secretive governance community. Other businesses may not have those advantages.

On the blockchain programming front, let's say I want to be a blockchain programmer. That's easy to say because it's at least a little true; I justified my initial investment here with the idea that at least if it went to zero at the end of the day I'd have blockchain programming skills. My C++ is rusty but I doubt I would have any problem getting it back given how fast I've learned Python to build Steem-related things.

But having said that, how do I go about it? I can see that Steemit Inc. is willing to take contributions - from @timcliff in the Steem code itself, from @eonwarped on Condenser. I've been doing some very light consulting for @fuzz-ai, who found the bug that resulted in 0.20.7, and I was impressed by how the Steem team handled that.

But there's not a lot of clarity on what contributions are considered worthwhile and how to figure out what would be worth doing. All of the contributions I listed above have been either uncontroversial or talked to death before doing, and I'm not sure how to identify either one, possibly going back to the lack of open governance again.

Earlier today I had the fairly simple idea of allowing a user to cancel the withdrawal of a delegation during the 5-day waiting period. That seems like it's purely beneficial, and probably something simple enough that I could figure out how to code it. But then what? If there were some sort of a standard process for moving Steem ideas into code and then into consideration, it would be more worthwhile for me to grow into that role.

If the answer is "I drop it into Github and it's ignored," or "I have to hash it out with Smooth over months" then it's not going to end up very high on my list. Becoming the crank who comes up with crazy ideas and drops them in pull requests to massive drama is kind of philosophically appealing, but not really remunerative.

Becoming the guy who builds Steem code responsibly... well, I'm not especially impressed with what the current ones have to deal with. The community is definitely one of the big benefits of Steem, but figuring out how to interface with it as a blockchain programmer is an unsolved problem. Since I'm personally introverted not quite to the point of being xenophobic, especially in the winter, I'm probably not the one to take that on.

Where I've thought about hacking into it, and so far every time come up with a better use of my time, is in testing and documentation. Anyone interested in taking on the Steem code really needs a better resource for understanding it, and that's something I have the skillset to reasonably work on, if I can find some motivation for doing it.