But, over the course of the 4 years and now, some of those miners are still working for the network.
They were still rewarded for those later contributions in the form of votes on the posts they made for those contributions. They were likely rewarded better for their contributions than someone like myself who has a lower stake than them since votes follow money and they would be in a better place to get quality rewards from their contributions.
This would have been terrible for someone like me, who put almost 4 years of work into building an account and presence, only to have to fucked over twice - first on Steem, then on Hive. There would have been zero benefit for anyone who had remained active through all of that shit, over all of that time.
It's completely fair that a lot of users wouldn't adopt a new network that didn't retain their past contributions. That is probably the biggest advantage of the air drop is encouraging adoption of this fork. That being said anyone who would adopt a blank network would immediately be in charge of the network as they wouldn't be fighting an upstream battle against ill-gotten stake. It's likely the rewards for users who adopt a blank network would be higher than the average of users who adopted the Hive fork.
Yes, but without the stake or the stake spread widely, would developers get rewarded by artists and poets? The development would still need to happen, but not everyone would understand the value of it.
For better and worse though. A lot of the early accounts were relatively "self-centered" and without some kind of mechanism to discourage that, it could create a very bad result. Remember that while there might be a start from zero, no one in that first group would be a blank slate with some of the most abusive from the past having nothing in their way to counter their abuse. dart/tard come to mind, as do quite a few others.