The main problem is in reality that all that the people did, like bid bots, self voting, etc was not the little guy, all of these ideas came from the "big guys", you see actually little guys don't have that much money to invest, so I doubt they are buying much votes, this is a reserved space for people who do have money, and just to prove it check the trending page most posts are there because of bid bots and the people buying them are people with very high ranks, most of them already own a lot of Steem probably bought but I really don't know, and check out who owns the bid bots, I was really surprised to see how much @freedom makes off of delegating to them. Self voting while not that good is not much of an issue except if you post a lot of times a day and own a lot of SP, again not something for the little guy. I'm sorry if you don't like this but 50/50 only helps the big guys, linear curve (actually a dumb name) can only help the big guys and the downvote can also be a tool to also help only the big guys. Those are the main reasons why most people fear HF21 will actually make a lot of people leave Steemit.