"I dont even know where to start to dismiss this nonsense."
You can start by fixing your head. The upvotes other people assign to content creators is stake they own and have a right to assign where they want. The folks that receive those upvotes then own them. If you don't like the content, don't assign rewards to it. That's what's fair and just and everyone knows it.
DV's are taxes that steal what others pay to content creators, just like taxes on your paycheck steal your pay from your employer. They're identical in effect and mechanism.
You're wrong and you should change your mind and become right.
"DVs arent even applied across the board or in any structured way or are they targeted or consistent nor are there rules/laws that theyre bound by."
There is code that determines how and how much DV's can be. There are multiple parties that do structure DV's. There are many people that have been consistently DV'd after being targeted and their rewards eliminated permanently. Many have left the platform after being so targeted and have posted regarding that targeting and consistent punitive taxation that drove them away. Anyone that has any stake can DV any content, but that doesn't mean that some don't specifically target and consistently eliminate all their victims' author rewards. You are making false statements you know to be false, because you're absolutely wrong, and true statements will not support your position. You resort to insults and ad hominems because that's what people that are losing arguments do, when facts do not support their position.
"Code is king as you say."
And we can observe the abysmal user retention that extant DV code has caused. My point is not that code can't code such things, but that the extant code allows unrestrained taxation of author rewards that has caused an exodus of people that came to this platform to earn rewards and were taxed by all manner of flaggots until they abandoned it, because the unrestrained taxation censored Hive worse than Twatter, Fakebook, and Youtool. They went back to their 2gen social media because Hive was worse.
DV's are a lot of why Hive is worse. You refuse to acknowledge that DV's have destroyed Hive's user retention for seven years, and refuse to answer my question of how many has the rally car brought in. You claim I 'spew nonsense' but simply won't answer my questions because the answers are obvious and prove you're wrong. You haven't provided one iota of factual argument to support your position. All you've done is insult me, ignore my questions, deride my arguments and claim to be fixing everything. Not one relevant fact in a sea of false statements, insults, and self important bloviation has come from you in this discussion.
It's not this or that individual that is causing Hive to fail. Those individuals can only harm Hive because Hive code allows it. It's Hive's code that is causing those individuals to harm Hive. Society is people, and some people, as you point out, suck. Hive is a social media platform, and therefore should be coded such that people that suck can't tax earning of Hive creators to the limit of their stake. Allowing people that suck to do things that suck to people that post content here is idiotic - not a non-issue.
"There is no faceless cabal conspiring to benefit itself at the expense of the community."
After seven years the majority of stake is still held by a couple dozen whales, and because Hive is a plutocracy, those whales completely control the witnesses and therefore govern Hive. You can say 'No, U!' all you want, but because those whales have the majority of stake and stake isn't widely distributed across Hive users, Hive isn't decentralized and isn't resilient against external censorship. Those whales, like Pavel Durov, can be threatened by external actors and compelled to take actions that degrade Hive. Centralization of stake is a security risk. DV's decrease the stake content creators get for their posts, and decrease the distribution of Hive by returning the Hive others assigned to creators to the rewards pool, where - surprise! - whales get ~90% of it. DV's concentrate stake in the wallets of the down voters.
Can I prove they actively conspire? No. Are they? Yes. They certainly understand these things and act in their own interest.
You're being disingenuous when you deny that DV's are the main issue that has caused Hive abominable user retention. Thousands of them have said that's what drove them off the platform. Major influencers with large audiences say so to their audiences and that poisons the market for Hive instead of brings people in to earn for posting. I do not believe you don't know this is happening. DV's absolutely censor people by driving them from the platform because they were designed to do that to spammers, scammers, and plagiarists - to whom and only whom they should be applied for that purpose, and for which they work admirably. They also work great to shut people up you don't want posting, and they've done that to >1m users that came here to earn for their posts and got taxed off.
"...Im actually trying to fix the faults..."
LOL You're certainly getting paid well to. How many new users have your fixes brought to Hive? How many new users has the rally car brought to Hive? It's not a ridiculous question. It's a ridiculous scam.