1. 50 hours spent on a single blog post is a lot. But try to be more explicit about what you're aiming at with this. Otherwise you just spent 50 hours on a single blog post.
2. Tagging 1700 people can easily be qualified as spam. Own it.
3. I've been here (and there, on Steemit) since Oct 2016 (as I you already found out). Never a top 21 witness. Never part of the ninja mine gang. Didn't mine a single block back when mining was a thing. Didn't use sock puppets, wasn't a sock puppet for anyone. This doesn't tell any story in your post, but it's almost 4 years of continuous activity on this platform, as a single individual.

There were bad times and good times. If you want to generate more context, try looking at the witness activities and updates (votes & actual blog posts). You will find out that early adopters always had a big say in here. Joining the platform in 2016 didn't make me an early adopter, mind you.

Also, the atmosphere and actions were very charged in the first 2-3 years. It took some mental strength just to stay around - there was always uncertainty about development (is there any?), about management (who is in charge, actually?), about whales pumping or dumping (not if, but how much), or about selling the majority stake to a third party - which, eventually, happened.

I would focus more on the last year, if you want to paint an accurate picture. I'm not saying this isn't centralized, on the contrary, I'm saying it was heavily centralized, it is centralized now, but not as much as before, so what can we actually DO about it?

P.S. If you can't handle @klye conversations you're going to have a hard time here. Back when things were really charged, klye was among the nice guys. Almost a princess.