Not surprised, there were only a few people who were constantly getting upvotes from dMania anyway. I believe they will be the ones affected the most. As you mentioned, those people were getting crazy amounts of upvotes (whether it be the number of upvotes or the STU) per day. Some of them getting 3 upvotes totalling about 150-200 STU too. per day
Staying neutral with millions of SP can be... good for Steemit Inc. themselves, however also investing and assisting some platforms who are actually useful to overall Open Source community and Steem blockchain general can be also beneficial as well. For example, Utopian has been doing a pretty good job getting people involved in contributing to Open Source and being rewarded in exchange, a lot of projects have been born thanks to Utopian, DTube is also doing a good job making a video-sharing site with fairly popular users.
Oh and... Emre... Let's make a meme app.
Dtube takes a ton of your reward and doesn't keep the videos past 7 days.
Dlive is currently the better platform for videos
My words are more on the "community" side rather than the technical side. Furious Pete uses DTube for example.