I was a supporter of trying the linear curve becuase and in the beginning it was exciting to see everyone getting some little bit of reward. Unfortunately it was too easy to game the system.

Yeah, and this was pointed out many times by people who were not in favor of linear rewards for precisely this reason (and there were other reasons too). The rationale was questioned long before the HF was officially proposed and implemented and Steemit, Inc. was asked directly why linear was suddenly preferred, in light of the previous rationale for non-linear. Those questions were pretty much entirely ignored.

But I'm curious...

How did it take two full years of economic and social destruction through a variety of abuses and exploits for this to come up again and finally be addressed? That is the truly mind-boggling aspect to all of this. What has Steem's "leadership" been doing, other than completely ignoring every call to scrap linearity, as well as other terrible protocols?

I would say that our consensus witnesses have been mostly derelict...again. We still can't even get much insight from most of them about the current proposed fork. Meanwhile, I've written a post for each of the two components of this fork, engaged on other people's posts about it, and I'm not even allowed in the witness/investor/cool people club chat where these discussions allegedly take place. Isn't that kind of ironic?