Why would anyone buy Bitcoin?

I ask myself that all the time.
The days of dimes for lambos has passed.
Dogecoin, too.

The biggest bloggers are not the biggest stake holders.

Technically accurate.

source

Show how the distribution is centralizing over time.

Care to count how many of those are the same people with multiple accounts?

I've talked to people with enough cash to buy in, and be somebody, and they don't want to because they still can't overcome the concentration as it is.
Until it takes 1000 accounts to hand out the first 50% of the inflation, rather than 20 accounts in the hands of ~10 people, the stake is too concentrated to appeal to anybody with enough cash to be one of those 1000.

To overcome a 500mv cap on voting from the pool requires an investment of ~86k usd.
To overcome a 1000mv cap costs ~172k usd.
This only gets worse as the price rises.

Right now, if you invested that amount you would still be diluted by the larger accounts because the pool has no limit on how many mv you can use to pull from it.

While there are many people out there that could do it, none of them are doing it.
8 years should be enough time to test this arrangement of how the pool is used.
Top down management isn't attracting newbs.
It drives them away once they do the math.
Why would they continue to play once the whale votes are in the past?

I can never take this argument seriously because I live under the poverty line and there's a chance that I make it to whale status this cycle.

Not everybody has the strength of character to exercise this level of discipline.
Not that they couldn't learn, just that it doesn't come natural to them.

To top it all off blogging is totally subjective so the jobs the network currently offers are not creating objective value.

Yes, smart contracts will open more avenues for revenue, and that can only help, imo.

If the users were creating objective value they'd get rewards.

You can pull the math, I bet.
50% of the pool goes to the top 20 accounts, this is not in dispute, what percentage makes it past the first 100 accounts?
I'm betting that number will explain a lot about the distribution and how it is concentrating to the top.

The whale experiment 4x'd the vote values of the rest of us.
The reward curve is different now, so I wouldn't expect more than a doubling of vote values, but do more people want to blog for pennies or do they want to blog for dimes?
Right now the incentives benefit the haves and drive away the havenots, being that there are more havenots this is a losing strategy, imo.
Unless, you are only looking for <1000 active users.

I've followed the largest curators and much of what they vote to people ends up getting dumped, rather than encourage the savers, they pay the dumpers.
Is it any wonder that the price is in the basement?

Who loses?

The people that buy in.

Those that earn their way in can only lose if they ride the price down.
Again, encouraging immediate dumping.

Why would anyone run a node if they don't get paid?

They won't.

Oh wait that's exactly what's happening.
Why is that?

No better options.