And why did it take us over a year and a half to get a first attempt of a remotely sound economic reform package across the line?
And we had to go around the witnesses to Inc directly to get it done

You really have no idea what you are talking about. It took a year and a half, mostly, because of Steemit Inc's stubbornness on addressing anything that wasn't on their holy roadmap. Most witnesses demonstrably (because there are posts on chain) supported most or all of this for a year or more and repeatedly tried to get Steemit to budge on including it in the development pipeline, only to face a brick wall (and occasional threats of using their stake to vote out noisy witnesses).

Yes, you were apparently instrumental in pushing this over the line by eventually helping to convince Steemit Inc to show a bit of flexibility and prioritize this into a release (though I imagine that management changes, mass layoffs, a community so fed up that people started talking about forking out their stake, and their failure to make much progress on their existing roadmap had something to do with it too). For that you deserve credit. At which point, not surprisingly because nearly all witnesses supported it all along, only a tiny handful of witnesses opposed any of it in any way (and @therealwolf was not one of them to my recollection).

Now on the other hand, I share a lot of your frustration with the bid bots/vote sellers and agree with most of what you have to say about that, although, again, I've seen nothing to suggest that @therealwolf was in any way involved with trying to interfere with economic improvements. He actually seemed to me to be interested in seeing it happen.

And beyond all that, this post has mostly worked the way it is supposed to. It has gotten downvoted to $24 so far and will likely go lower still. The vote buyer lost money. The vote sellers lost curation rewards. All is going according to plan so far. Let's stop attacking each other needlessly.