I think that PAL net will be around for a long time.

I believe the reason for so-called disappearing comments is simply the person leaving the comment is not a PALnet member. Yes it can be confusing, however PALnet allows for a new start for people that have been slammed and banged about in steemit and are constantly having their comments greyed out by individuals or groups. Also PALnet does take steps to protect it's users, and will ban/block people from their portal if needed. Many will see this as censorship, but there are a few common sense rules that are and will be enforced on PALnet. No action taken on the PALnet side will effect how an individuals post are viewed on steemit or other front ends.

As for the 50/50 split, that is only on your PAL tokens. They are not taking 50% of your steem token rewards from your steemit post or other front end post. You are actually getting two payouts on PALnet post. Steem and PAL

It is my understanding that if you vote on a post that does not have #palnet as a tag then you are not spending any of your PALnet Vote Power on that post. So you get no curation reward. If a non palnet member uses the #palnet tag, I am not sure what would happen, I would like to think that the non-used 50% would go to the token burn pile, but like you I am not sure on that.

The nice thing about the scot-tribes/communities, is you do not need to use their front end. You can stay on steemit and see all the comments, vote on a post and if #palnet is in the tag of that post you will be automatically curating with your PALnet vote.

If an individual has grown completely tired of any of the other front ends because of harassment, then they can spend the vast majority of their time on PAlnet and not be bothered by the Steemian, or Leoians or any of the other front end groups. If you are on PALnet you will not see comments from non-palnet users in you replies box. Like wise you will not see comments you made to non-palnet post in your comment box.

A separate yet shared platform experience. Think back to the very early days of the internet prior to netscape and mozilla web browsers, when there was AOL, and CompuServe, If you wanted to see something on AOL you had to be a member, if you wanted to see something on CompuServe you had to be a member of their system, web browsers changed all that. One day there will be a block browser that will change the separation but shared concept.