All things being subjective, and whether or not if anyone's in agreement with the results of guild curation works.. there's a level of objectivity in the work performed by SG members with their routine - you can see them distributing votes to the folks in SG list day in and out. Now what else is there to say when most who are not associated with guild works are also earning pretty decently, including @ats-david who seems to be doing well too just being a solo-operator with no objective, obligatory work so to speak.

I will remain with my opinion that SG should either revise their fees or just try to stay away from occupying top trending all too often from self-upvotes. Personally, this is the only valid problem with SG that I'm seeing in the entire dissertation that @ats-david has put forth. Whether they're overpaid or not, I hope they'll discuss it with the whales that have delegated their voting power to see if its fair compensation. I'm sure they've discussed it in length.

So to answer @ats-david

I invite any comments – whether you agree or disagree. Let’s have a civil discussion and see if we can’t figure out better ways to tackle user adoption, retention, and any perceived unfairness of the platform.

I will recommend everybody to check out the post that I've put up a few days ago regarding this. Blockchain communities are a VERY new thing (even the metrics are so elusive) and I hope if anyone's serious enough in trying to help the platform, please read and study up, or hire the consultancy firm stated in this post:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@kevinwong/building-and-evaluating-the-value-of-blockchain-communities