I think there is an answer to all your questions, and it's profiteering. There are two different routes to ROI: sucking the money out of a business, or profiteering, and building a business up until the stock is worth more than it was when you bought it, or investing.
The two are diametrically opposed philosophically, morally, and really, as in bricks and mortar reality. We observe that Steem is built on profiteering. The rhetoric of profiteers is never forthright, stating they intend to destroy the goose that lays the golden egg because they can just seize the broken shells and move on and profit, but ever seeks to get people to invest. What people invest they take.
Until posts are no longer able to be manipulated to create unlimited rewards, profiteers will be able to manipulate the financial mechanisms and extract unlimited rewards from the pool using posts as a vector. I have proposed implementation of the Huey Long algorithm, that will limit the payout on posts to no less than 3% of median payout, and no more than 300%, which is three orders of magnitude, but too little to enable profiteering via financial manipulation using stake as a weapon.
No one wants to limit payouts, because everyone dreams of whale votes and sudden riches who isn't a whale using such votes to suck the vast majority of the rewards pool into their wallet. This is as short sighted as gamblers betting their last dime. Les Miserables were Napolean's soldiers and prisoners of war that gambled away their clothes in English prisons, so this is not a new psychological phenomenon.
Steem is designed for maximum ROI for ninjaminers, not for creating a society that burgeons over time, despite the mechanism underlying Steem enabling that. However, as Steem value falls, and the market collapses due to the financial benefits inuring only to a few whales, eventually those whales need to move on and invest in new vehicles for profit.
At that time, a HF that implements something like the Huey Long algorithm can transform Steem from a vehicle for profiteering into a vehicle for investors, swapping parasitization of production for long term growth and capital gains.
I await the departure of the whales, so that the new paradigm of government Steem enables can be invested in, grow, and flourish without vampires sucking it's life's blood into their yawning maws. That day approaches, and the lower the price of Steem, the sooner it comes.
Bernie is one of the original ninjaminers. He invented the bidbot with @randowhale. He's not dumb, he's just consumed with avarice, and his poor impulse control renders him incapable of investment (as far as I can tell, anyway). When he sees an opportunity off chain that enables him to swap his stake, or the fiat he's sold stake for, for another target he can mine for ROI, he'll be gone. The problem is doing so will crash the price of Steem because he has so much of it, and the community will be strongly motivated to seek redress for the many torts he's committed. Then the blockchain will be evidence that will cost him money, and lots of it.
He wants it deleted, and then he can move on, he thinks. It won't be. I am pretty sure some folks have mirrors of the chain that keep them off chain and private, and killing Steem won't set him free from the evidence of his criminal acts.
Also, he's just the face of a community of profiteers, not the only one. Looking at steemd, you can see the relationships between he and other witnesses, substantial stakeholders, and bidbot owners like @markymark. He is the visible face of predation, but they all work together to consume the value of the content creators provide. This is why he's not crushed by the collective weight of the other profiteers, and why @dan flagging him to -16 rep was significant.
I expected the downvote pool to be used by him to make Steem social media a void wasteland, crashing the price so the whales could move on to greener pastures. While that hasn't yet happened, it's early days.
We shall see what comes, when it comes. Either way I am not focused on my stake, but on the underlying mechanism of Steem that enables voluntarist government.
Thanks!