You act as if I voted this post to the place it is all on my own, when in reality my own single vote is worth less than $2 at this time.

no, i understand that you didnt upvote your own payout. Im not saying (and didnt mean to imply) that there was any wrong doing on your part. Like many of steem's woes, the problem here comes from whales with poor judgement.

Instead of complaining about how this was too simple, maybe try to set the bar higher by making another tutorial incorporating the things you suggested. Clearly there is some serious interest in this topic here, and you get more bees with honey.

I could undoubtedly do that. But here's my reverse ask. Why the hell would I? I don't mean me specifically. I don't really post, as what little time i have to invest in steem goes toward developing my website. ( I was, in fact, considering making a series of posts about steem development. Seeing a post like this at the top of trending, if anything, makes me less inclined to do so, not more).

I mean why would anyone? Actually developing something worthwhile is difficult and time consuming. Just like developing real-world business models is difficult and time consuming. Why invest the time and work when there is just as much money to be made way more easily by copy and pasting a few lines from the steemit github, or, if youre not github inclined, making a post that says something like "well you know itunes/AirBnB/hedge funds/fiverrr/insert successful business here. Well, we could do that on steem (btw, all real examples).

why do real development (whether commerical or technical), when you can post fluff either as a "development proposal" or under #steemit-dev throw ina little sycophantry and cheerleading and get at least as much (most likely more) reward

I think you may be missing the point. If I added the things you suggested, it may no longer be a 'simple' enough example for anyone with basic skills to follow

precisely what set of basic skills do you expect someone to have to benefit from this? I see two potential categories of people who will watch this:

1.people who know nothing at all about javascript, and who really aren't going to be able to do anything with it aside from copy and paste it into notepad.

1. people who have a limited knowledge of javascript, who might be able to use this to the end of making something worthwhile.

Its never going to do much for group #1. Group 2 almost definitely knows how to get a value from a text input with getelementbyidm so theyre not really getting anything from this that they wouldn't easily be able to figure out from looking at the api call.

here though, just so you don't think im not contributing anything at all to the discussion. this is what i did with steem today, besides bitching at you.

function parsepostinapost(stringtoparse){
var stringified = JSON.stringify(stringtoparse, undefined, 2)
stringified.substring(1).slice(0, -1).replace(/post\!\!\!(.*?)\/(.*?)\!\!\!post/ig , 
"<div class='panel-group'><div class='panel panel-default'><div class='panel-heading' 
style='padding:0px 0px 0px 0px; height:50px'><div style='float:left; font-weight:600; height:
50px'' id='bpcl$1$2'><input id='votepct$1$2 type='number' value='100' min='1' max='100' 
style='color: white; font-weight:300; font-size:xx-small; font-family:arial; background-color:
#386dbb; width: 4em'><a  href='#' onclick=scupvote('$1','$2',document.getElementById('votepct$1$2').value)>
<span class='icon icon-bars fa fa-chevron-up fa-2x' style='opacity:.5; height:50px'></span>
</a><a  href='#' onclick=scdv('$1','$2',document.getElementById('votepct$1$2').value)><span class='icon icon-bars fa fa-chevron-down fa-2x' style='opacity:.5'>
</span></a>$2 by $1 </div><div style= 'text-align: right; float: right; height:50px' id='bh$1$2'>
<a data-toggle='collapse' onclick=incpostbody('$1','$2') href=#bc$1$2><span class='icon icon-bars fa fa-bars fa-fw' style='opacity:.5'></span></a><a target='_blank' href='!?$1/$2'>
<span class='icon icon-link-external fa fa-external-link fa-fw  'style='opacity:.5'>
</span></a></div></div><div class='clearfix'></div><div style='color:black; background-color:white' class='panel-collapse collapse' id='bc$1$2'>
<div class='panel-body' style='color:black; background-color=white'>
<div style='color:black; background-color=white' id='b$1$2'></div>
<div class='panel-footer'><div id='blogfooter$1$2'></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>")

function incpostbody(author, permlink){
steem.api.getContent(author, permlink, function(err, result){
var parsedresult = markdownparse(result.body)
var idlink = "b" + author + permlink
document.getElementById(idlink).innerHTML = parsedresult
});
}