It's definitely not anti-Steemit to raise concerns about things that could derail a project that you care about or are invested in. I've been "pro" bitcoin for at least 3 years and I still think there's 100 things that could go wrong with it. And, although I thought the DAO was a cool idea, the groupthink around it was a huge red flag and I ended up staying well away from it. Friendly criticism is vital :)

So, yes, I agree with you that fairly wealthy accounts thinking about federating articles is a bad sign. The reason I had the idea to run the numbers on curation etc was, in fact, that I'd seen some federated fiction and considered whether I should do this myself. But when I looked at the author in question's stats, despite getting onto the front page and having a much longer posting history, they only had a third more followers than I did. Followers, and visibility in a particular community, are the key for anyone playing a long game, so that one-off payment in SBD seems to have a pretty limited value (although it would still be nice).