Great post and I agree 100% after witnessing some of the behaviour of this new upper class. One issue is curation, people are addicted to the easy curation rewards through auto voting and select the highest-paid authors. There is also the effect of continual engagement as many members of this oligarchy engage each other and are active all day making friends.

I find some of the relationship most off-putting, it is discouraging when new to the chain seeing some people with average blogs getting above-average votes. My main issue is with the proposals, the Decentralized Hive Fund (formally SPS) is receiving all of Steemit Inc's share. Try passing something there if you aren't a famous developer. I submitted a proposal yesterday to burn some of the HBD going into the proposal system so we can collectively reduce inflation. There is no trickle-down effect with the DAO, except by controlling the supply of tokens that can go into it.