HF19 had nothing to do with it. It was going to hell anyway, already, beforehand. HF19 just extended the bonanza of rewards pool milking to everyone, instead of just the premined giant whale accounts, who were already doing that 'responsibly' before.

I'm not holding my breath on there being any change in the leopard's spots. They have kept denying thte facts of my own experiences, but today, none other than @furion came out and said what I have been saying since I first started to try and work with steemd

https://steemit.com/steem/@furion/updates-on-steem-python-steemdata-and-the-node-situation

Full rpc steemd nodes are a challenge to run. Currently, they require expensive servers with 128GB of RAM, and regular baby-sitting. To my knowledge, there are no open solutions for managing steemd clusters . Such software would be much appreciated, not only by developers, but also exchanges (currently, both Bitfinex and Poloniex have STEEM&SBD deposits/withdrawals frozen, as they are failing to tame resource hungry steemd [2]).

As nodes became harder and more expensive to run, community powered nodes disappeared.
Aside from @gtg's node, I am not aware of any public nodes. As far as I know, two of the best community developers, @jesta and @good-karma run their own. Steemit's nodes are generally a bit slow, and occasionally unreliable [3].

BTW @furion, I already wrote failover scripts, and if anyone had been sponsoring my work, even a little bit more (and I did this work while living in a homeless shelter and spending my days at drop in centres) I might have already provided the solution they were looking for.

But nobody wants to support my work, because I tell it like it is about the shit I am dealing with, which looks bad. Damn straight it looks bad, because it is bad. Amazingly, it is possible for a piece of shit to smell like shit.