You are partly right. I never really needed it, but I was blinded by the rewards, and I didn't complain about the misaligned financial incentives of the system as long as I was on the right side of it. To be fair, when I joined, the system was much different. @steemit controlled a large share of the stake like a company. Proposal system didn't exist.

I went to the early SteemFest events, met with some good people, some of those are still my friends to this day, especially in the French community. But I never managed to create a real connection with these 'higher-up' profiles. All they saw in me was my coding abilities. Anytime they interacted with me, they had an idea in mind. Sadly for them, I have been exploited countless times in my early life, and I possess a good bullshit detector. Therefore their tactics never worked on me.

They never really included me in the top hierarchy. I was never in the most private channels. I got upvoted because of the work I did (steemjs, steemwhales, dtube, etc). It was their way of thanking me and keeping me in the system.

You are very wrong about one thing: I always complained even when I was on the 'virtual' payroll. When I see problems, I have to open my mouth. That's the way I am. That's the reason why I got excluded. Not the other way around.

1. First strike: SteemWhales exposed many people to the issue with wealth distribution in the blockchain. @heimindanger/downvote-me-if-you-can-t
2. Second strike: opening my mouth about the 'bidbots' problem, what you call now 'auto voting'. I was strongly against it and made many enemies.
   @heimindanger/don-t-use-vote-selling-bots-use-promoted-instead-a-bot-that-upvotes-you-when-you-burn-money
   @heimindanger/proof-of-no-brain
3. My ultimate mistake and what costed me my reputation and landing on all the blacklists, was the Justin Sun drama. Unlike 90% of the other victims of this, I am not chinese. I simply respect individual property and freedom of trade. Therefore I had to open my mouth (again) when they stole from the chinese guy. FYI they literally deleted the purchased stake through a secret hard-fork.
   @heimindanger/how-to-fuck-a-dpos-blockchain

All this is publicly available information, thanks to the transparency and immutability of the blockchain. This is the proof that I am a faithful in what I say. People are just lazy to read.