Great points. You've earned my tiny witness vote.
While I feel that a lot of different projects give a lot to the blockchain...perhaps more of the top 20 spots should be given to programmers that are capable of reviewing the code...or groups that have at least one member that can review the code, or at the very least hire someone to do so. It's horrible that a hard fork can be put forward by Steemit and not reviewed by the witnesses. That's their job. It's nice to support projects, but if they can't have members that do the traditional jobs of the witnesses, should they be in the top 20? I'm leaning towards no, because this was an utter failure.
I can't believe that they announced it as a success after either. The Steemit blog post, and the whole idea that we need to just wait was just horrible. They acted like they expected this. Like if it was a possibility that they never even mentioned. That's horrible. No one knew that it was a possibility that we all would be completely unable to vote or post or comment after the HF, and yet it would still be declared a success, and any problems would be minimized. I hope that we move very quickly towards decentralizing the production of the code for Steem, because that was a travesty. We need more coders that have no affiliation with Steem, and will be able to produce their own patches and forks, and review any code that is proposed.