And why did it take us over a year and a half to get a first attempt of a remotely sound economic reform package across the line?
And we had to go around the witnesses to Inc directly to get it done
You really have no idea what you are talking about. It took a year and a half, mostly, because of Steemit Inc's stubbornness on addressing anything that wasn't on their holy roadmap. Most witnesses demonstrably (because there are posts on chain) supported most or all of this for a year or more and repeatedly tried to get Steemit to budge on including it in the development pipeline, only to face a brick wall (and occasional threats of using their stake to vote out noisy witnesses).
Yes, you were apparently instrumental in pushing this over the line by eventually helping to convince Steemit Inc to show a bit of flexibility and prioritize this into a release (though I imagine that management changes, mass layoffs, a community so fed up that people started talking about forking out their stake, and their failure to make much progress on their existing roadmap had something to do with it too). For that you deserve credit. At which point, not surprisingly because nearly all witnesses supported it all along, only a tiny handful of witnesses opposed any of it in any way (and @therealwolf was not one of them to my recollection).
Now on the other hand, I share a lot of your frustration with the bid bots/vote sellers and agree with most of what you have to say about that, although, again, I've seen nothing to suggest that @therealwolf was in any way involved with trying to interfere with economic improvements. He actually seemed to me to be interested in seeing it happen.
And beyond all that, this post has mostly worked the way it is supposed to. It has gotten downvoted to $24 so far and will likely go lower still. The vote buyer lost money. The vote sellers lost curation rewards. All is going according to plan so far. Let's stop attacking each other needlessly.
The part where I suspected many of the bid bot owner witnesses resisting the EIP is speculative as I have no access to the witness channel. I am not referring to the point in time after the proposal got Inc support recently as I suspect most would capitulate by then anyway, and that was the only point after which I saw support from him. 10ish months early when I raised the EIP as a package, I only remember butting heads with you and timcliff over the numbers (regrettably in hindsight, as you guys were one of the very few at that time open to actual economic reform). The only top 20 who supported it then was cervantes. When I first mentioned it 6 months prior to that (details were far less fleshed out then of course) it ended quickly when ned dismissing it, you may recall him likening n^1.3 to n^2.
The last thing I care about is credit. As you said, many had arrived to the measures within the EIP long before I even knew about Steem. From the outside it's very suspect to see that a relatively obvious set of reforms (didn't have to be this exact set, but any sensible set) would take this long. Sure there are many practical reasons, but it feels rational to suspect that impediment from the group with the most to lose from a broadly fair economy made moves against it over all this time may have been one of them. Perhaps you're right and that the group who had the most to lose were its staunchest supporters all along. I'd be slightly surprised but it's certainly possible.
You have no idea how tedious and precarious it was to try to get these changes through knowing full well that a group of bid bot owners in the top 20 had sufficient numbers to veto the motion. Perhaps the combination of asymmetry of information with me being outside of the witness group and pent up frustration over the past 20 months contributed to my overly accusatory tone.
Neverthesless, his support for economic reform aside, it was only a minor part of my comment and the rest of my points stand.