Hey my friend, great post! I've been offline over Christmas and the New Year .. but having just spent the last couple of hours getting up to speed on current events, I can see your point! One of the greatest strengths of the platform (apart from the steem) was the free speech angle, people are hungry for it and it's a business model in itself. When you consider that a lot of flagging is due to ideological reasons and then contemplate the google advertising, we can at least ponder that there is a deeper agenda at play here and that the house is being cleaned up to make it more palatable to outside interests. I haven't carried out a fraction of the research into this that you have .. but its a thought.