I am glad this is coming from you and it can't be qualified as a 'minnow' rant. The plain truth is to make it on Steemit regardless of the brain you are coming with, you have to know a couple of dolphins or whales that will keep supporting you or you will come in with big investment to buy big steem power and votes.
I love steemit but I don't think this problem is going away. Steem is definitely not number one on @ned's mind and the witnesses and their supporters are the owners of the voting bots. Like you said we can't have a solution until the minnows vote start to matter and our trending page is not populated by bots d post. I always wonder why trending as to do the amount and not the number of people upvoting the post.
I wish Steemit should be saved as soon as possible as a lot are leaving and and some are discouraged to the point of not been able to come up with a good post or settle for posting shitty post instead because it doesn't seems to matter much any more.
Hey @golddeejay.
I think you are right. Perhaps he's been overcome by the SMTs "big" idea. But lets not forget that this is the origin. This has to be fixed too or the SMTs tokens will still face similar challenges in the nearest future.
I love this platform and I wanna see it work.