People joined this community with certain expectations. I dislike the idea of changing rules in the middle of the game. When Justin Sun came there were accounts that voted up the Sun witnesses just enough to have a dread-lock of power between those that would change the protocol in one direction and one that would change it in a different way. I quietly was pleased because finally I thought we could see the Steem experiment as it was at the time to playout without changing again and again as before.

It concerns me if these parameters can be changed on a whim also with Hive Engine tokens. Is this so?

There is also a great deal of self-voting on Proof of Brain. Just browse with Steemfiles. I was doing auto voting too, with the same curators! It effectively gave them a real big stake of Proof of Brain! I removed permission for @steemauto and found I was still voting while I was asleep. I never figured out which of @ewp or @steemauto had been doing it. I have a tool that figures this kind of thing out but I didn't bother to dig it up. I guess with liberty ending in the west I didn't find it too important.

P.S.: I did remove permission from other apps that might have been doing this. That's action taken, but I didn't investigate which did so.

P.S.S.: I now vote 100% manually and check hivestats every morning to see that my account is not voting while I am asleep.