My question is this, though:

Why do bid-bots not just decrease their overhead? Once they have the liquid STEEM they convert it into SP, and the money that other people could have had by curating they receive instead.

This still does nothing to address the concerns with small content creators. How the hell do I get writer friends onto Steem when I know that they're likely to get cents on a dollar compared to what they do elsewhere and the big dogs are going to be the ones getting everything? With a week to get attention to your posts and get them up-voted before they lose value, there's no reason to post evergreen content on Steem when it could fare better elsewhere.

The only reason I'm here is because I wanted to make games and distribute them for free, and Steem seemed like a way to monetize that. Ultimately, I think that's been an absolute failure, in part due to how Steem's been faring on price (I don't believe Steemit has much control over this), but in part because the whole system is weighted toward people who have patrons.

The only reason I'm still around is for the community, but since Steem doesn't really have social features it's limited in that regard because most of the people I'm still sticking around to hang out with I'm interacting with on other platforms.

I think I speak for a lot of us who have left the platform when I say that we're demoralized and we don't have much faith in the system as it stands. To have changes that could seriously hurt people who are trying to claw their way up doesn't make sense. What portion of posts making 20 STEEM right now have done so on their own merits, versus being economically fueled?

The promise of Steem as a platform was that it would be a path to independence, and right now I don't think it's offering that to very many people. There are maybe less than a hundred people who could claim that Steem is anything more than a passion project or pipe dream for them. The nice thing about the linear system is that it's fair. I can see using a curve to weed out dust, especially if it's proven that a lot of very low value posts are bot activity instead of authentic engagement, but I'm not sold on HF 21 doing that.