The community itself was responsible for the "disappearance" of Generation 3 with the #newsteem. The result was satisfactory in my eyes, but the flag wars were extremely unpleasant.

I agree with this. I think the flag wars also drove a lot of people away. I was never sure which was "the lesser of two evils".

I also think that they don't want to "destroy" them (there's a lot of talented developer brains behind them), everything has its pros and cons. But everyone should be open to constructive suggestions for change, without condemning one side or the other.

Exactly. Several of the Gen-4 bot teams have made positive contributions in other ways (especially upvu that I'm aware of). There are one or two that I'm suspicious of, but I think the dominant ones actually do want the ecosystem to succeed.

The only question I have is how manipulable the counter variant would be. Could it be that this is precisely why the counter was once abolished?

Yeah, that's definitely a point that would need careful attention. I'm sure that a lot of effort has gone into view counting technologies, so I imagine it should be possible to implement, but I honestly don't know. I guess there would be a perpetual cat & mouse game to be played with fraudsters...