It is an easy thing to bash it and sometimes we don't seem to be able to think of solutions. I have no solutions on 90% self voting but I frown upon it.

Yeah there are more people as well as applications and developers like Busy,org and Dtube. Dmania had at one point before it closed had delegation from Steemit Inc.

Hivemind (or “hive”) will power Communities on Steem, but that’s only one important use case. It’s designed to be a developer-friendly layer on top of the Steem blockchain that will enable any developer to access a database containing all the social information stored on the Steem blockchain without having to rely on minimalistic core blockchain APIs. As with all the software we release, hive is fully open source. It is our goal that everyone developing applications powered by Steem will want to take advantage of hive, so that a consistent user experience can be maintained across the growing ecosystem of Steem applications.

You can read more about it here https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/update-communities-hivemind