accept that proof of brain will always be gamed

Agreed

The present downvote issue is driving many long term users away, and that will likely escalate under HF 21.

The current downovote system is horribly broken. It is certainly possible that the HF21 proposal will just make things worse, but our hope is that we can actually move "proof of brain" more towards a healthy system of upvotes and downvotes - very different than what we have today.

I think the downvote is unnecessary.

Sorry, I completely disagree with this one. If we want a system that is even remotely functional in terms of rewarding users for their contributions, we need a way to disincentivize behavior that is taking value away at the expense of the reset of the community.

In embracing that it is a POS, the company should [start to] offer more POS rewards in steem for inactivity or light activity based upon SP.

This idea has been discussed a lot, and I am generally in support of something along these lines, but we have yet to find a solution that can be implemented which actually moves the needle and that we can get consensus on.

Steem can focus on bringing in users through marketing instead of proceeding in HF21.

I disagree. Since I joined, we have had the issue that most of the people we bring in leave. There are bigger underlying issues that need to be addressed. Positive "PR" is not enough (IMO).

The emphasis would need to be that steem doesn't ban ideas, and that steemit will be the new go to place to find information and hopefully to connect to their favorite speakers.

Many have been trying this angle for years, and it has not gotten us very far.

An auxilary focus would be to try to create a revenue stream through advertisement in the white space and to reach the point of profitability, and when profitable using equity to secure a minimum value that steem can reach.

Also part of the ideas being discussed, but there are limitations with how far this can take us. There still needs to be a reason that people want to use the Steem blockchain, and be willing to "pay" for everything in the form of purchasing tokens.

...

Honestly, you do have a lot of good ideas. I share a lot of your vision, and many of the things that you are suggesting are things that myself and others have been pushing for for a long time.

The main area where I don't think we are going to agree, is that from my perspective - the underlying economics behind the token distribution are severely broken in their current form. In my opinion, in addition to many of the good ideas that you suggest - we need to find a way to make the "proof of brain" part of our economy function more closely to the way it was intended to work.