I sure hope your wishes come true too @mitchunter :)

I think one thing we need is a better system to demonstrate engagement, maybe a combination of # of people having actually read the post (in terms of time spend on the page) and meand/median upvote values.

As it is, there can be 700 1% votes from accounts that have never posted, and a couple that are worth a fortune, and the system finds nothing suspicious at all.

Course, that won't solve all the problems, given the economic incentives tend to meddle with people's brains a bit, and that it's near impossible to properly control how fairly the Steem gets distributed, what with the pre-mine and high stakes holders having such overwhelming power on the platform.

Lot's of stuff for the devs to work on, though of course they'd rather work on the shiny new additions than fix the parts that their most powerful users are exploiting most of the time X/

I personally hope for the best, and work on documenting whatever I find interesting / whatever projects I'm working on.

If it all falls to pieces, the Discord communities like @slothicorn, @steemsilvergold, @steemmakers, @curie and others will most certainly organize themselves and migrate to some other crypto-powered platform that's more suited to their particular goals, or even make their own.

But who knows... maybe Steemit is just experiencing growing pains and will find it's way to a better system one of these days :)

In any case, Happy Steemday to you !