On the other side there are some great things to build on ...
Yes, I know, thanks for reminding me. These things and future possibilities are one of the reasons why I stayed until now.
On the other side it's hard to stay optimistic if I feel that some stake holders with a bad impact on communities and user experience (who for example destroy the fun of the participants of my soccer prediction competition) enjoy full support from the most influential HIVE entities. That surprised me and causes a feeling of complete powerlessness. They themselves maximize profits with early automated upvotes, but at the same time 'condemn' users like me who decided to support other users by upvoting their comments instead of their main posts, not to feed the "curation snipers". They want to force me to vote in a way that benefits them.
Communities need their MODERATION abilities fixed ASAP ... a community should be able to interact and be able to keep out all the negative influences they want... a community is an owned location you should be able to decide your experience.
Heavy emphasis and focus on rewards perhaps connects all content across all communities presently so that aspect may still be impacted and it does seem that aspect of the experience was what you were impacted by the most... but perhaps we should find ways to make everything else more important and voting less important so that outside negative actors can't impact communities as much as they presently can.