without getting into a debate about the success of the retention program, I just have to point out that this is super convienient (and also super bad) "logic"
Obv, the ones that youre still voting on are still here. otherwise, you wouldn't still be voting on them. The question is how many have been lost because even scraps you throw them (while retaining the lions share of the reward pool for the under-the-table funding of various projects all run by the same group of people) aren't sufficient to keep them interested.
you can't both claim that youre retention efforts have been successful, and that measurement of such success is elusive.
Yup definitely not arguing about whether or not guild efforts have been successful retaining people. We can't control anyone. The point is helping whales distribute far more votes. There was a period back in middle 2016 when the zipfian distribution was heavily skewed only for the few early adopters. Now the tail is fatter.
I don't necessarily agree that zeta is the most relevant stastic to measure rewards, but i think it would be interesting to see a real statistical analysis of late july zeta. vs zeta right now.
A more valid stastical metric for the success of reward distribution between mid july and now would be weekly lists of users, grouped according to standard deviation from the mean for rewards, and how much of the reward pool went to which standard deviations.
I suspect (though i havent yet been able to figure out how to pull out the information in an automated way) that neither metric would support your position.