A politic answer if ever I've heard one. I understand that you are trying to give the impression of answering a question, while really addressing nothing that was put across in my original comment. I've worked in PR @andrarchy, I know the game. Good move actually not responding to my comment but rather someone else's on the thread. That's a degree of separation, but I'd still hope/ask for a response to what I've raised in the original comment.

So, are you going to answer to anything I've said? Why exactly should anyone have confidence in a platform where the largest stakeholders, and architects (steemit.inc) are working with the people who pretty much everyone agrees are ruining said platform? That is what you are doing by your continued acceptance of bidbot owners in consensus witness positions. You can try to brush over it as much as you like, but while you have a little cabal of vote sellers in the committee of people who make the decisions on what gets changed at code level, there will never be any meaningful change. It's almost like that's what you guys want? Please just give me, and anyone else who's read this comment, and voted it up to the top, a straight answer on why steemit.inc remains complicit through it's impartiality? Use your stake to get these people out of consensus position and then use your stake to stop these mechanisms in perpetuity. Or explain why you won't?

I'm not sure how communities and SMT's will address the issue of your endorsement of these detrimental mechanisms (bidbots) through inaction.

If the plan is to remove all reward mechanism from the steem token so that it's similar to Etherium as a base token people have to purchase to build communities with their own POB functionality, then I can see the potential that this might allow regulation against vote selling, but that would entirely depend on the people running each community.

I do appreciate you responding to my comment, but I think it's something of a nothing answer to the concerns I've raised.

Imagine a steem where steemit.inc lead by example to keep the platform functioning as it was envisioned in the whitepaper. I would like to see that version of steem given a chance! It has been around 2 years since the hard fork that allowed bidbots to become so prevalent. 2 years of you sitting on stake that could have been used to positive effect to stop this massive leech of value and dumbing down of the outward face of the content discovery pages. I would argue that it's the destruction of the trending/hot pages that destroyed the forward momentum steem had, thus sending the price on a nose dive. Yes, steem price would have depreciated with the bear market, but not half as much without our front facing content pages pretty much a joke.

Do something about all this... with your stake! It is not too late to salvage a nugget of gold out of this shit pile. Saying that a new development of communities and SMT's will save the show, while doing nothing to stop the original development (steem) from being further damaged is counterintuitive. All of these new developments are just things to hope for; hypotheticals' for tomorrow.

Sorting out how the steem ecosystem works right now is not a hypothetical, it's something that can be done to improve things now, and for the future.