I don't need to better understand it, I understand it very well!

You should better understand what the permissionless property of blockchains means. No one needs to be 'allowed' to do anything, they can just do it.

I addressed this above when I said stinc and high stake people could stop vote buying by excersising their right to be allowed to downvote both the people who run these 'so called' services, and the people who use them! That would be them exercising power in a permissionless environment. It would exercise a measure of control, and considering stinc have had massive stake lying around for 2 years doing nothing it boggles my mind why they haven't at least attempted to stop something that is so obviously of detriment to both the platform and the price of the steem. Obvs that would start a whole new discussion about if we're now centralized... but I feel that the stake distribution on steem (and the ninja mining by more than just stinc) means that ship has sailed.

The only way in which it can be stopped is by changing to system rules and incentives to make it a smaller or non-existent niche.

This is true to an extent, but what I said about responsible use of downvote to stop negative 'niches' from proliferating is valid.

The network effect is what can truly make steem a wold class platform. An ever expanding network of people sharing content, and the advertising that would bring and other investment streams is what can catapult steem to overtake Facebook. This isn't rocket science. It also follows that as steem's value proposition is to actually pay people for their content, we need to fulfill that value proposition to succeed.

I know that there are issues to do with balance between stake flowing out and stake being converted into SP, also the relative lack of trading of steem as a token.

But, as I stated in a comment above, if the issue of steem being a fundamentally unappealing place for content creators doesn't change soon, we will lose any first mover advantage to facebook coin or voice.

I don't disagree that the best way to change all of this is to make the system not reward vote selling/delegating behavior... and better reward manual curation or delegating to a guild that does the work for you, I'm just unsure this HF21 will achieve that, and if it doesn't... well the clock is ticking.