Great analysis as always @eroche. My concern is people are too quick to chastise those that are getting the whale's share of the rewards. How many of them have invested their time and money into the platform? I see them as working harder and most importantly, smarter than most. Indeed there is some gaming of the system that that can be looked at as unhealthy, but if the witnesses and rules allow it then isn't it smart to pursue it with your time and money? If you disagree with people making $$ on comments, which I do, then let the witnesses know. Remove your votes from the one's that support that and vote for one's who don't.
As you know I work hard with SteemitBC, but I probably don't work as smart as I need to, therefore we haven't been rewarded as handsomely as I had hoped. It means I have to work smarter.
I grew up thinking the successful were the enemy, that they were stealing from everyone else. Indeed some are, but the majority work hard and work smart. We should encourage the entrepreneurs in all of us to strive to be in that upper echelon. Work hard, work smart, be successful.
I completely agree with your points and I have been surprised by how many people share this view on this platform.
The one thing I would add though is if you take a step back and ignore the rewards completely, I think the platform will gain more momentum and be healthier with more diverse content. One crude way to measure this is by how many people are posting, but this is really hard to get at (bots multiple accounts etc) but I think by looking at groupings and how the groupings of these people are changing over time we can get some insights. I am testing different metrics and cuts of the data to arrive at useful metrics which people will be able to refer to for reliable information on the platform.
I have looked at a few aspects in the last few weeks but there are many more we can use. For example in the working smarter aspect, it would be interesting to look at how networked people are. I'll be doing some analysis of the discord groups, Twitter posts etc to see if there is anything there that we can look at to inform smarter networking.