"I personally do not like the fact that people with a lot of SP have more power over others who have little. It's like in the real world, but worse."

This is basically how Steem is supposed to work. It's designed to work exactly like that. I mean, Steem Power is influence and the more Steem Power you have, the more influence you will have. That means that you will have more control.

Not really sure what you mean with oppressive platform. Hard work and effort has always been rewarded and sure, some users was lucky enough to receive a shit ton of support in the early days, which basically made them grow to large extents. However, I've seen many of these early adopters leave, and a handful of my friends gave up during the early days because they didn't felt that Steem was "fair".

Also, even though some people have always tried to reward hard work and great quality, Steem has been going downhill for a long period of time due to greed and how we allowed bid-bot abuse etc. HF21 is to counter those things and bring back manual curation again, so rewards can be spread to more users than before... I can't see how that would be a bad thing.

And, I don't agree with that statement. Whales didn't kill Steem. Everyone on Steem contributed to this disaster of a platform because we allowed bid-bit abuse, greed and selfish behaviour. HF21 put an end to most of that. It should probably have been done a long time ago, but I'd rather see something change than nothing.

That being said, HF21 and #newsteem might not be the best solution, but it was at least something that was made to counter bad behaviour and to steer us in the right direction again. You can't expect hardfork to change everything into something amazing when Steem has been terrible for about 2 years... It will take time to change that, but I truly believe that HF21 was for the greater good.

"active users keeps going down (as well as the price of Steem)."

These things often goes hand in hand. I have seen it many times before as well. Whenever the price drops most takers are leaving the platform, or they become inactive because they aren't able to earn as much as they did when the price was high. When the price goes up, some of those users starts to come back too.

But, you are right. We don't have as much active users as before and users are leaving Steem on a more or less daily basis because they feel disappointed or whatever... But, I personally think that most of these people fail to see the bigger picture... And, that is ultimately their loss, if and when the price of Steem goes up again.