Hey, @practicalthought.

I've read about the eventual dispersal to the community. While it hasn't largely happened yet, they do have 10 million STEEM committed to the foundation the STEEM Alliance is working on. And while that doesn't constitute all their STEEM, it's a hefty amount. If it happens, obviously.

I get the centralization part. I also get that they created STEEM and despite what anyone else thinks, by virtue of creating it, they have more right to it than anyone. Even if they welch on their good intentions. It is true, that has consequences, and people call it all kinds of things, but as you say later, they've really done nothing, overtly anyway, that I can tell. They're not really controlling anything here, other than through the hard forks, and for the most part, they've made things more Wild West than not (except if you don't have money to invest or another way to quickly pump up RCs).

re: shrink the pool

I've read that, too, but how do we know this? And would it make any difference if they were upvoting at a quarter of percent as opposed to 10 percent or higher?

I went looking for posts (unfortunately spent most of the day doing it) and came up with nothing regarding why Steemit shouldn't do it. I know I've read comments as to why, but those are even harder to find.

I've come to the conclusion on a lot of what happens here, especially after Hard Fork 20, that no one really knows what would happen, and that it's oftentimes (maybe not all the time) merely conjecture. I don't want conjecture. I want proof. I want to see where it was tested and how badly it failed. Maybe someone has already done that and I just can't find it because, well, you can't hardly find what you want on STEEM.

Which is another thing, but besides the point. :)