Man, I learned a lot from reading this post and the comments. One thing I learned is that I need to remember that a lot of history happened here before I joined about two months after you posted this. As a result of my noobity, my understanding of many things that happened later is incomplete, and particularly that the threat of centralization was far stronger before you made this post, and did not again become so dire until @ned sold.
Thanks for the humbling lesson. I very much appreciate it. Happy that my witness vote for you will carry over to Hive.