Vote trading schemes were also called out by much of the community. It's why other curation trails don't work that way. If people want to put idle stake to use, they can follow any number of curation trails. Curators like OCD and Curangel put a lot of effort into combing through Hive. They have community curators searching for things to recommend and cross-checking each other. Anybody doing a "join our group and get upvotes" style system is going to get downvoted. A massive majority of Hive users decided we didn't like how things were going when that was going on. It just isn't a winnable fight to tell us all we're wrong and that it should be profitable. The downvotes are going to win

It isn't really two large communities that need to come together. It's one person doing some false advertising about what's considered acceptable by the vast majority of users on Hive, not being able to meet the expectations they're setting in their advertising, and setting people up for a bad time when they find out the truth