On this we agree, and I am confident most of the community does as well. r0nd0n is a out of the box thinker. I know him and admire him from the pir8 radio shows he used to do on Discord. He ran @freezepeach for years, but it was a thankless job and few donors supported the effort, which eventually made it futile. He's not against the community in any way, despite he and I don't always agree on every policy detail.
I think he's searching for solutions, and perhaps the idea of separating author rewards from the governance token sounded like a good idea that would cause the whales to lighten up on opinion flagging and let free speech blossom, or at least blossom more than it is now.
I am confident he's not toadying up as a minion of oligarchs. He's got a heart for the community, every bit as strong as my own.
However, onboarding more users Hive will disappoint will not benefit the platform at all. We need to create a rewards structure that puts more benefits in the wallets of the creators that produce all the value Hive has. Social media has become the largest financial sector of global markets in less than a decade, and Hive is horribly missing that train. Our thesis of directly rewarding creators for content instead of centralizing profit in a stock corporation has been horribly mishandled. That's the problem that keeps Hive from retaining even a fraction of 1% of the users that have signed up, whether it's bogus opinion flagging, or the curation rewards farming the accounts of their friends and sock puppets, the lack of a better shake on Hive than creators get on vile platforms like Fakebook, Youtool, and Twatter is a terrible demonstration of competence of our governance.
The same 37 whales have more than half the stake on the platform, and this reveals that after 7 years of operations, they maintain their take of the bulk of rewards from the pool, through curation rewards, the DHF, witness 10%, and all the other mechanisms besides author rewards, because few of them blog. It's that avarice that keeps Hive from success. The plutocratic governance model, with stake equaling political power, makes Hive utterly defenseless from outside stake that could buy the entire platform for pocket change. That's what happened to Steem, and will happen here, sooner or later (if it hasn't already been ongoing, as whales sell their accounts rather than their tokens, to avoid making the handovers public knowledge), and that also makes those stakes golden parachutes the whales can ride off into the sunset on if Hive gets bought out.
It's hard to devise a plan besides moving author rewards to a second layer that distances them from governance, and I don't know how else we might rectify the problem when the whales will resort to whatever is necessary to maintain their governance as they have for 7 years.
I agree with your analysis as biggest hurdle to change things. Maybe another way would be to reduce the impact of curating? 50/50 seems not fair given the efforts of authoring vs. curating.
Some years ago Edicted proposed savings accounts with nominal interest to compensate whales with ROI to replace curation rewards. HBD savings accounts are now implemented with 20% interest rates. However, whales have not eschewed curation rewards. They are simply double dipping, as there is no mechanism that prevents them from doing so. Since they control governance, as the only metric by which political control is availed is stake, and whales have the majority of stake on Hive, they have not sought to cut themselves off from curation reward income.
The problem is greed, pure and simple.
More like control.
They already have all the power and hive enough to control the pool for years to come.
It's not greed, it's desire for power.
Much worse, imo.