You've missed a total freeze for everyone except for the biggest whales. The main part of HF20 was a system called Resource Credits which is a way to track how expensive various transactions are in terms of network resources. Every account is afforded a budget of Resource Credit Mana (Mana is the unit of account here) based on their Steem Power that replenishes from 0 to 100% in five days just like Steem Power now. The most active users had incurred RC and Voting Mana debt and had their respective Manas at insane negative values. Almost nobody could do shit. A patch was released to reset all negative values to zero. Even now Planktons can't do much. Then they decided to release another patch increasing everybody's RC by 10x. That will take effect very soon. Resource Credits may be a good thing in the long run but the way this hardfork was implemented was a major fuckup in the opinion of many people. It wasn't adequately tested before going live. Going tenting in the sticks without electricity for a week would've been a great move at this stage.

There's a lot of discussion about what's the best compromise between fighting spam and not excluding newbies. There are many points to consider depending on the time perspective one is looking at this from. For scaling and monetization of network resources, some kind of tracking of and an internal market for resource consumption is a great thing. On the other hand there will be no scaling if newbies can't do shit without forking out hundreds of dollars of cash - most people will not look at Steem twice if they learn that they have to pay to play without being able to use the system in some reasonable capacity first. Now there's a system in place whose parameters can be tweaked according to the demands of any situation. But it's been a shitty week for nearly everyone and how Steemit Inc has been handling communication to the user base has been less than stellar. At first, they declared the HF a success even though 99,99 of the users could not literally interact with the blockchain at all except read. Then things were supposed to normalize in five days. Turns out they weren't going to, so patches have been released. Because folks have had their RC and Voting Manas in the gutter on Tuesday, Wednesday and yesterday, much fewer upvotes have been given. However, the chain keeps spitting out rewards like clockwork which is why I suppose we will see some weird rewards next week. So, you shouldn't stop voting because you're not at the magical 100%, yet.