I think we’ve gotten to a better middle ground lately, where bigger accounts aren’t supporting the leeches taking things out all the time where before we weren’t doing that.
I'm not really sure what to feel about this point since most rewards here aren't because it's done by merit like creating good content. If I had to compare the harsh system other social platforms with creators who had to crawl their way to the top, I'd say Hive has it easy mode. The top youtubers and twitch streamers had to evolve their content creation to get where they are and now they get brand deals which the platform also takes a cut from. In short, there is an economic incentive to really push people to make good content but it doesn't work like this on Hive where anyone, and I mean anyone who barely has the skills to entertain can get a piece of the pie. If you raise the bar for rewards by merit, you end up losing a lot of the users because they just don't cut it.
As for "earning" the rewards, would you consider top content creators from a site as leeches if they get paid by the platform for producing content and retaining an audience or drive traffic? it goes back to the old argument about why punish entertainers for entertaining and call them leeches?