Good points. While I'm not in any way interested in who is more "steemy" 😂 I agree that etiquette would be nice. There's no direct way to impose that (thankfully) so I guess posts like this rally us all up to support it ad hoc, as we vote up, down or not at all.
You do make your own accusation here
... further damage was done to the participants and to the brand.
Further, you imply that @kyle did this only for the Steem
... it has become much easier to just create FUD and try take down other authors to redistribute rewards in part back to themselves and earn rewards on a nice click-bait post of their own in the meantime.
For the record, while I don't support @kyle in this issue, this post is a red flag for me in tone as well as content.