We were originally planning on setting aside the Steem into a separate pool to be used for tipping outside of Steem such as Twitter or Reddit.

This idea sounds really incredible, I think there are enough devs here to work on it,if that can be done it could be very useful to increase the amount of content creators.

Many seem to point at active authors and keep saying how the changes have made everyone post less,

I suppose the market has also caused active content creators to slow down their activity here, but I don't think that's all bad. Steem still has a lot of things to fix (as a community and also with the front-ends), so it's better to fix all these things before more content creators arrive and find a bad experience (which will eventually generate a negative snowball effect).

Now, since engagement token issuance is still a bit on the low side as there's only 61 holders of 1k engage tokens or more we will only be buying up with half of the initial 5% planned on a weekly to biweekly basis.

Excuse me, but do you have any posts where I can find out how that token works? I've seen it around, but I really have no idea how it works.

It's always interesting to pass by your blog, I'm glad to see that things with downvoters have improved (at least they don't bother your posts anymore :)