I view the idea that the STEEM blockchain is truly decentralized as a fallacy. It's obvious that it is indeed being controlled and the the fact that there is only one authority to develop and implement hardforks is a clear testament to that. If hardforks are top-down, than the whole platform certainly has clear top-down elements. In other words, it is being governed in a centralized way at least to an extent.

I too fell for the SBD thing and I was actually citing it as one of the things that are making the Steem blockchain more competitive - a token that is more stable and less volotile to be used in commerce (with no fees and super fast transactions).

If SBDs can be pumped so easily, you can safely assume the same can be done to bitUSD. Why wouldn't that be possible?