I'm surprised to have such a controversial figure commenting here. While I have your attention, would you mind discussing any relationship (if any) you have with @ranchorelaxo and any concerns within the community about the disproportionate amount of the rewards pool your analysis posts accumulate on a daily basis? You've been at the center of a lot of drama, flag wars, etc. I'd be interested in hearing your side of the story. Maybe do an interview, if you're up for it. If you have a post that summarizes things, please link to it in a reply. My hope is Steem will be mostly for people who care about wealth creation over value extraction and consider the benefits of psychological egoism.

As to your points, there are many front ends to Steem. As I've said before, Steem is not Steemit. Steem is more valuable than Steemit. Steemit is, in many ways, just a reference implementation of what's possible with the Steem blockchain. We can use https://steempeak.com/ or https://busy.org/ or build our own, if we like. Saying the front end of Steem is paramount doesn't make it so and may not align with the long term goals of Steemit, Inc. I talked about this a bit after SteemFest²: Bridging the Gap Between Perception and Reality.

I agree, HF20 has been pretty frustrating. A post telling everyone to expect some disruptions is quite different from "things will be completely unusable for a time." It seems we have a new update which will take another day or so to replay the full nodes to see the benefit of. Witnesses are already building and replaying their backups to be ready, but replay time is unavoidable at this point. HF20 was rough, no doubt. To say it was a failure would require us to compare it to similar technologies in the blockchain space which have done better. Are there any examples or is Steem doing something brand new?

You mention competition. What are some of your favorites at this point? All I've seen, so far, are unfulfilled promises and/or centralized solutions such as wordpress with token incentives added on top.

I think HF20 was a pretty rough release, for sure. I hope we get a detailed explanation of what went wrong from the team that built the code so we can learn from it and create better expectations in the future.