But it didn't take long for the STEEM Whales, Witnesses and Dev’s to grasp the likely implications of said acquisition. If Justin Sun insisted on SP being used as originally intended, to curate content on Steemit,...

You had me up until here. There was no indication that Justin Sun had any plans for Steem or SP other than to move all Steem tokens to Tron (to the point of announcing that Steem tokens will turn into nothing). To be fair,that was the major factor that spurred the action.