Sign up is horrible and difficult putting off new users.
Witnesses, overall, add very little value to the platform and are financially rewarded for doing nothing.
Up vote bots are a bad concept and don't add any value.
There is no person we can look to for guidance since 
Make sign up easy, instant and free. This would promote healthy growth. All of the witnesses should be addressing this issue but instead they're just writing silly posts about nothing.
Get rid of witnesses as decision makers - they're not doing enough work to justify their salaries and generally see Steemit as a source of revenue. They provide little value or utility to the ecosystem and generally make money by ripping off users who don't understand they're being used.
Up vote bots are just a terrible idea and simply make money for the account holder. They are oblivious to the quality of the content they're upvoting and give a skewed view of value i.e. they make a post look valuable when in reality no one is interested in it - its boring stuff, and people think this is what others want to read. They are simply money making machines for the account holder. Just scrap them.
Most successful companies have a figure head who knows what they're doing, have high levels of expertise, make the right decisions and bring a company forward and grow. Every successful company that has every existed has had people at the top fixing hard problems and being rewarded for their efforts. On Steemit the witnesses are just ordinary folks who are in way over their heads:
"look at the pink balloon I got at Disney world! I met goofy!".
"I'm a techno vegan eco-bubble head :)"
"Holiday pics of me and my family but I hurt my fanny on the water slide :'("
"Hey don't criticise me!!! I've been organising a birthday party!"
Witnesses are not the same type of people who work at google, went to MIT, can solve problems and provide real value to a complex project. They have mortgages, kids, dogs - they have better things to do than sit at a computer for hours on end fiddling with code and thinking about how to fix complex problems. No company in their right mind would hire them.
No user who is interested in generating an income from the platform should have a say in its overall development because it will simply be, as it is now, a grab for cash operation. Employees who are paid for their expertise should be hired to build and market Steemit. The people who add the value should get the greatest rewards. Witnesses (99%) are simply not fit for the job.
This argument is based on the understanding that witnesses decide on hard-forks and collectively make proposed changes to the platform. My argument is that they shouldn't have a say because they don't have the expertise or credentials to understand what the right decisions are.
Witnesses will always vote in ways that will serve their self interests, which is always bad because they'll always vote to keep their stake valuable, vote against inflation, want the Steem dollar price high etc.
Decisions should always be made by people with expertise, credentials and out of an understanding that promoting individual self interest isn't the right decision in the grander scheme of things. Experts should get paid generously, regardless of the Steem price, based on general user satisfaction, value adding, ease of use, growth, problem solving etc. It wouldn't be fair to pay them in Steem tokens and it would only warp their intentions and bias them - like a witness.
