Great job putting this together. It's been sad to see the platform change so much since I joined & I'll admit that I used to used pay for upvotes up until a few months ago when I started to see the things you point out in this post.
I've always known that this platform is like the real world and that the majority of power (SP) is held by a tiny minority of accounts who receive most of the rewards but there did seem to be a few whales who wanted to make things better but now it seems like things have gone too far to be fixed if it is even possible to fix them at all.
I'm powering down for this reason as I don't have the faith in the platform that I once did & I don't want to holding 1000+ worthless Steem Power in 6 months to a year thanks to greedy whales & thier Bidbots.