It gives me a hopeful feeling when hearing these issues debated openly at Witness level. One of my steem chores is to reexamine my votes with witnesses having support from @freedom. A witness with their support told me it is a secondary account of @ned's . If true the conflict of interest and non-transparency would be beyond the pale.

Although likely a minority, my motivation is not the money. 500 of my SPs were purchased so as to get a sliding voting bar and the first self voting happened with me the other day so as to recover from my first, and unexpected, flagging. The rewards are a great bonus, however.

You may be interested in a proposal put forward by me to the Devcoin Team, in which my position is HR Admin. The idea of an "ultimatum" was not thought to be a positive approach by some members; yet the idea can be considered GPL. 😎

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=233997.msg38975686#msg3897568