This is how I see Dan's down vote as well. Look at it from his perspective: he is just curating to mold the platform into something that represents his principles. That's what we should ALL be doing.
Arbitrarily restricting the voting power of whales IS theft, it's not like theft. They earned that SP either through investing, for being here early or curating. Why take away their incentives? Aren't they the same incentives for everybody? Your comment (if implemented) guts the principles described in the whitepaper, or at the very least disrupts and imbalances them.
I like this article, it is open, direct and sounds similar to discussions I've heard in the BitShares community. I know transparency is important to Dan, but I agree he hasn't figured out how to balance the interests of all parties (investors, developers, user community) yet, and I do hope he figures it out soon; I don't want steem to fade away b/c he or Ned can't delegate to a PR team to inform the community or use it to monitor the pulse of the community.
An advisory board comprised of reputable, carefully chosen members of the community would be very useful for communications in both directions, from the community to Steemit leaders AND as a mechanism to explain the rational of decisions made by Steemit to the community.
I sure hope Dan & Ned seriously take some time to reflect on this open letter and the comments people are making about it. I think some type of advisory board is a good idea. I suspect Ned & Dan may think that somehow gives away too much control of the direction the platform is headed. But that is an overly fearful position to take IMO. The concept is an advisory board, meaning it provides advice, not dictate policy. Such a board is not a matter of control, it's a matter of a better management structure to supply quality information to decision makers, who are not obligated to follow it. If they choose not to follow it I would hope their rational would be explained. That's very important also.
In early 2015 a marketing advisory board was suggested to help Dan promote BitShares more effectively and help him review and edit Dan's disclosures so they wouldn't have such a sharp, dramatic affect on investor attitudes OR the trading value of BitShares. Stan + Dan's approach to that suggestion was to put the responsibility of selecting such a board of advisors onto someone else, rather than seriously look into who would be qualified to serve in that role themselves. Ultimately no action was taken.
Do note however that unbeknown to the vast majority of the BitShares community during that time, the totally new graphene architecture was under development, and they didn't want that information leaking out. An advisory board might have compromised that. Still, the transition from the 0.9.x version to 2.0 was not handled well at all IMO, tho ultimately 2.0 did become a reality, or steem wouldn't exist today.
I sincerely hope Dan will learn how to manage his team better and balance the often contrary interests between the parties involved.