And my response every single time has been that the huge difference there is that the other 50% of the stake would be going directly to tons of different creators that way, thus decentralizing Hive more. This part never seems to have a response besides "the DHF is decentralized," which is pretty laughable.

Posts were always intended as a way to fund work done for Hive (marketing, software development work, etc). The DHF is another way. The DHF delivers a fixed inflationary amount and gets around some fundament problems associated with funding ongoing work, but posts allow stakeholders to allocate more. I also routinely vote up posts by devs for the work they do, but I'm well aware that the benefits of their work tend to far exceed the amount they can make that way.

Right now, I believe that it makes sense to focus on building more funds for marketing and dev work right now. This could also be done via changes to the base inflation rates in a hardfork, but using posts allows for more flexible voting by the stakeholders, without requiring code changes and a hardfork, and it allows direct voting by stakeholders versus delegated voting via witnesses. You seem to think there is something sacred about the current hardcoded ratios for rewards, but that's just not the case. They were arbitrary numbers almost pulled out of a hat, but that was never a real problem for Hive, because post voting allows for more flexibility about where the rewards go, based on current conditions.

Also, as I have been clear from the beginning if you've read my early posts, I've never considered social media posts to be the primary purpose of Hive. It is a cool aspect, but I believe Hive has a much more useful future than just that.

As a side note, I believe content creators will actually earn more in the long run by funding more marketing and dev efforts, rather than just upvoting the current relatively small number of content creators, because we'll end up with a more valuable token to distribute.

The posts have had rewards declined, or in this case 100% burnt.

I didn't actually notice that, as hive.blog doesn't show it AFAICT. Another case where a little more dev work would be useful.

I'm not getting anything out of this.

Unfortunately, neither is the blockchain or the stakeholders. You may scare away some people who've just joined Hive and don't know who to believe, but are predisposed to believe the guy who claims the other guys are behaving badly. Beyond that, I suspect it is a wash.