Well damn, that's some top notch investigative work, and you've just gotten started @aggroed. Not quite "the Steemit Papers" over here, but veerrry innneresting to say the least...
"It makes me nervous that on the one hand he's basically left the platform except to pitch for another one (EOS), but is potentially controlling who the top witnesses are."
That's really the only thing that bothers me about all this, if it is Dan or some earliest adopter via friends and/or family. A lot of the contributors on here seem to have a level of Whale worship and Steemit naïveté that I'm just not comfortable with, and touting the platform as being some "work hard earn hard" scheme to the average joes, whilst simultaneously using an otherwise unachievable level of control to manipulate who will be the witnesses you're purporting to be part of an equalisation method, smacks of hypocrisy to me.
Steemit and Steem are great concepts and revolutionary developments, and Dan is a genius, but none of this is worth shit without its contributors irrespective of whatever he built, and however long ago he built it. I just wish people would consider that more often.
The whale worship that I've see so far is pretty much all avarice based, as far as I can tell. Everybody's trying to attract the attention of someone who will plop a big fat upvote on their post. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to be getting more rewards for my posts also, but I don't expect it to be handed to me by someone with whale power. Hell, I don't even have a clue to how to convert steem to usd, so for me, this is as much a challenge as anything else. For me, it's like, how much steempower can I get, and how long will it take to get to 500 sp? Meanwhile, I just try to put out reasonably good content...