Thank you!

Now, responding to your points is very tricky as this will put me either in the down vote list of community or the business. Now, one thing we all (you, me, community, witnesses, Steem INC, investors) all have in common is the greater good for the blockchain. Its good for everyone to have a small pie of a billion dollar blockchain than a million dollar blockchain.

As the blockchain grows, the following happens

• STEEM Inc's valuations goes up
• Investors get an opportunity of exit and larger funds will come in
• Witnesses will make more revenue as the number of transactions will go up
• community, ie the end users will more revenue as the value of STEEM will go up

So, I would tend to think that maintaining a top 17 (not 20) is perhaps a normal thing in a DPOS + Stake scenario like ours to ensure that the chain is never split and the direction from the founding team is achieved. So during the initial token supply was formed, the split might have done in a very careful manner to make sure that the long term objectives are met.

Most important objective of the company obviously will be to protect the interest of the investors IMHO.

The developers have done an awesome job at churning out code at a rate rivaling chains with bigger net worth. So if a team and company can do the difficult part of writing some of the most complicated code ever written, I would trust STEEM Inc with their decisions on how the initial token supply was done. Even with the process flaws that we have been mentioning, there was no attempt to fork the chain - so I would say, the checks in place is working.

Community can help the community first by implementing collaborative tests, once we have more code coverage and experience I believe the company will notice and take PRs and contributions. I would personally trust 2 of the top developers (in terms of their code contribution to STEEMIT) over anyone else as "code never lies" and not disrupting the business decisions and direction, there will be definitely a way to add more value to all the stake holders.

Its a win - win for everyone.