... taking something that was once essentially a commons and reserving it for the wealthy few so they can rent it back to us.
Yes, I think there is a little of this going on. Though there are different individuals involved, and they aren't all motivated by the same things. They seem to agree on the need for moving to the RC model where the cost of everything you do is tracked so that SMTs can be charged for their actual usage. That is needed technically for their next step.
Where there is disagreement among all stakeholders (including we users) is what amount of usage should be provided for free to people who sign up for a new account without having one of the dapps/SMTs sponsor them. For the SMTs they want them to buy a bunch of RCs for their users and so be the ones who give them enough to interact as that SMT sees fit. But what about people who just come to Steemit and sign up?
That's the point of contention right now. And some people really don't care if they lose everyone who can't afford to buy STEEM (and is willing to right off the bat after joining). While others truly believe they are giving them enough RCs now, though it is much less than the old bandwidth allowed newbies to do. And some of us think it's not nearly enough, and that spammers would need far more than what we're requesting for newbies.
In the end, we are all going to see this succeed or fail together. The rich will wind up in a wasteland, with falling STEEM prices, if the platform cannot grow. And if you can't retain new people, you can't grow.
Yeah I’m hoping that the intentions are good and this is all a temporary oversight, and I’ve read a lot of nice words by people in the know who obviously are a lot more informed about all of this than I am and have mostly believed them. However it is unfortunately too easy to overlook a problem for others when ones own pocket benefits from it.