You are right, it's not the same place it was a year ago. For me I feel the root of the problem is that we let go of governance. Steem is supposed to be a stakeholder governance platform, where the largest stakeholders are price-incentivized and empowered to govern the platform well, because for the largest stakeholders the only way to increase the value of their stake is to increase the value of the network. At some point this idea was given up on, the largest stakeholders became off-hands. There was no more attempt to police the stakeholders just below them, whom have much less incentive to govern well because they can grow at the expense of the larger ones.

Smaller pro-social stakeholders can do little too curb the greed of some others, and all their resources and attention are spent trying. The smaller day to day issues are deprioritised and ignored.

The bad governance itself derives from the belief that since it is your stake, you can do whatever you want with it, no matter how anti social, corrupt or destructive. This is the wrong mindset in my view, but widespread on Steem.