Ok to your first point, I guess we just have perception differences with respect to the relationship we think we are in.

I disagree with you that, if say I was in charge of things, I would code into the system different percentages, some different posting rules, etc. SteemIt has plenty of issues. Any software company that I've worked for in the past always has issues with their products, especially when they are in early stages. The entirety of crypto is nascent tech, a social/blogging network atop a crypto economy makes the whole experiment even more cutting edge/nascent/new. Plenty of bugs to work out. We should all continue to bitch, complain, raise awareness. Hopefully the devs and bigs are paying attention (they certainly have incentive to do so!) and working as diligently as they can to improve the platform. I'm hopeful that progress will be made. And in the meantime, I'm doing my best to focus on the best points of steemit...the legit community building that is going on, the excellent curation projects (curie, ocd, etc), the whales that are pretty clear-eyed about the issues and actively playing a positive role to make things better. So, we'll see...improvements will come along and the platform will steadily improve, or, maybe it will shake itself apart. I'm hoping for and putting my energy (and doing my best to be patient) to the former because I think SteemIt has the potential to be something great.