Unfortunately, I don't know how we persuade the people who think they're benefitting from the current arrangement, but maybe this will get their attention.

Personally I am skeptical that the chain can pull out of being a DeFi chain with a social media cover story at this point, since the powers that be show little interest in changing the status quo. But if change was possible it would probably help if there was an effort to establish some social norms around what was acceptable in terms of self-voting (I think it should be disapproved of, like on most normie social media), and establishing that delegating to someone else and getting upvotes based on your delegating is self-voting-by-proxy and therefore frowned upon. I think there is room for some automated upvoting along the lines of basic income, but there should be some norms about what's reasonable (maybe based on some sort of function of a global poverty-line metric?). Historically it seems like most of the efforts around establishing voting norms on the chain have been done in an "enforcement first" manner which ends up looking like bullying to the people on the receiving end. If people could be talked in to a better model first they might be inclined to accept some changes.

And so did the day we all woke up and learned that Tron's stake had been frozen in a back-room deal. I was thinking that when I typed it.

Yes, in the original conflict I thought that Steem and Justin Sun had the moral high ground and a group of witnesses not acting independently but conspiring behind closed doors to freeze someone's assets were clearly in the wrong. But rather than thinking through the governance issues that were revealed by the crisis and trying to improve things we got a new set of witnesses that mostly copied the same broken practices as the old ones, eg doing everything behind the scenes in private chat groups.