It isn't necessary for a clone of Steemit to use the Steem blockchain.
While this would abandon such stake as adopters of the new fork might have accrued in Steem, that may be of little import by the time such a fork has been developed, particularly if bots continue to degrade the engagement in Steemit society at the accelerating rate they are presently.
Frankly, eliminating the oligarchical whales that mined their stakes in Steem would be beneficial to the community, since they are the ones mining rewards with bots, or delegations to bots, and killing Steem now.
You are absolutely correct that considering Steemit the flagship of Steem is what Stinc should do. Myspace, Fakebook, Twatter, Youtool, and many more such platforms show the power of social media. That these have become the FAANGs of legendary financial import today is no fluke.
IMHO, Stinc is abandoning their greatest potential to success by neglecting Steemit. They are conflicted by their dependence on the mined stake whales, and the need of Steemit to counter that influence, which requires abandoning stake-weighting.
What Stinc is doing is comparable to a rubber manufacturer that harvests the sap of the latex producing trees by logging them and squeezing every last drop of sap from them once. The production of latex upon which rubber manufacturers depend will plummet quite soon after they begin doing that, after it peaks spectacularly.
Instead, rubber tappers in the jungles where these trees grow incise the bark, and induce the living trees to leak sap into buckets, which they sell to rubber manufacturers today. This is a sustainable source of latex, although it may produce less latex in a given quarter than pressing the latex out of logs might, it does so permanently, rather than for but one or two quarters of earnings.
Corporations which can simply change business models don't care. Quarterly returns are all that matters.
Similarly, Stinc is mining it's whales by crushing the society upon which Steem value is derived. Were the market for Steem globally only the 37 whales, Steem would have zero value. Steemit creates the value of Steem by providing thousands of users of Steem, and the whales are dependent on the volume of users for their wealth.
They are destroying their investment by sucking the rewards from the pool that should be driving growth in the market for Steem. Stinc is looking to move to a different business model than maintaining a social media site. They are preparing to abandon the single greatest growth business model that exists in the world today, for something else.
No one will lose more when this happens than the whales. Since they aren't seasoned investors, but instead geeks that happened to be able to mine Steem when the ninjamine occurred, they probably don't understand this very well.
I think that reflects poor vision, and a lack of management expertise.
Thanks!