Thanks for stopping by; I do remember you from "way back when."

I'm not going to pour energy into railing against what's already in the history books... I can think of a myriad reasons why things have turned out the way they have (from "first mover advantage" to excessive fragmentation), but I am primarily a blogger/writer and not a blockchain politician.

I will say this, though, excess "addiction" to decentralization isn't always ideal because you end losing certain benefits (scale, among them) when you break things into too many bits.

I have never been a huge fan of PoS governance precisely because someone can just buy their way in, if they are stealthy and cunning enough. That said, I am yet to encounter a perfect solution... maybe aside from all of us being sovereign nations of ONE, and that also seems less than ideal, so then it stops being perfect.

You're likely quite right in suggesting this is becoming more of a utility chain, and I'm sort of OK with that, as long as those who build here actually develop some dApps that are of interest to the greater world. Perhaps it's a bit of a stretch to compare, but Ethereum is pretty lame and useless *on its own," but what runs on Ethereum is anything but. If we'd bought ETH at $10 when Steem started... we'd be pretty happy today, if we still had it.

As for Dan, I'm not surprised he moved on... because that's his MO. He's a creative genius who creates, but soon gets bored with nurturing his creations. A lot of creative geniuses are; they typically end up with a lot more patents than millions.

I'm not far from 8 years here, myself... and plan to keep plugging along as best I can. Because I just enjoy the "social publishing" aspect of it, and it beats the heck out of places like Medium.