Great post. I'm also an academic and appreciate the plentiful links in your post. This was a bit of a history lesson for me regarding HF17.
No longer will you have to appeal to a centralized entity or authority to propose or implement changes to the system. You must convince the members of the system itself.
But won't there still be major token distribution issues following the chain split on Hive? My understanding was that there are several whales with a large portion of stake. And many of these whales are not quite as reasoned as you... and perhaps are prone to acting in a flippant or callow manner? Other entities besides Steemit received substantial stake from PoW mining, right?
I'm excited for Hive. Just wondering whether it's really sufficient to decentralize the DPoS governance and remove any detrimental whales.