I vote for the stabilizer because these funds ultimately go to the DHF so that the chain can build up enough of a war chest to support more development. I believe the future of Hive depends on increasing the amount of development that is done, and the blocktrades development team, as strong as it is, can only contribute so much.

These seem like valid reasons to support the project.

As @smooth has pointed out, I make the same curation rewards regardless of which posts I vote for (as long as those posts aren't actively downvoted, of course). If you check my curation rewards on something like hivestats.io, you'll actually find that my curation rewards tend to be a little lower than the optimal return. I haven't really bothered to analyze why.

My point here wasn't anything to do with higher or lower curation rewards - but the fact that curating usually spreads stake out - by giving it to the authors. In this case, you and OCDB and the others are able to maintain the same curation rewards for yourself, without giving a penny to anyone else. That's the definition of centralizing.

You're trying to argue that voting this way somehow builds (or at least maintains) my percentage of the stake, but that's not how it works: my stake erodes via the inflation regardless of whether it goes to the DHF account or to any other account. This is basic math. If you believe you can demonstrate otherwise, please show your work.

I just addressed part of this directly above - your relative stake is being protected, by not giving author rewards to users, and even moreso by instead sending all of that to the "DHF," which you pretty much single-handedly control at this point.

TLDR; I vote this way not to maximize my personal stake percentage (this doesn't do that), but because I believe it is the most beneficial thing for the long term viability of the network right now. It doesn't take a lot of effort to see that it is the work being done by devs that is bringing new users to the network.

I'm not claiming to know your intentions, I don't know you at all.

The point of my post was to shine some light on the utter hilarity of curangel & ocdb zeroing out posts, negging out people's reputations, and always chanting about how they're doing it to "protect the rewards pool" and limit "over-rewarded content."

The fact is, Nothing changed from Steem to Hive, except that StInc & Ned were replaced by you and your team.

Still just an oligarchy, pretending to be decentralized, and actively driving away all the content side of things at this point (which seems much better for your stake and the blockchain anyway)