"Is this another way of conceding that remuneration is not what the average quality content producer is receiving?"

It's not enough to drive user retention, so it's inadequate for the purpose for which it is claimed to be intended. The average payout is ~1500% higher. The median is what most people get, the average is all payouts divided by the number payed. This reveals that a very few receive orders of magnitude more than most do. It's proof of profiteering, due to the factors that produce this effect.

"I do not agree that this is manipulation but rather a stake-weighted rectification in a system that seems to operate without any rhyme or reason."

It is why self voting is optimized on the platform, because ninjaminers are profiteers, not investors. I have to point out that what we feel about it is immaterial. Whether we feel justified in rewarding ourselves does not impact the price of Steem, except how it causes us to act, and those actions affect the price of Steem.

Profiteering prevents the price of Steem from rising. In fact this is why payouts don't reward content creators enough to achieve the goal of raising the price. So, self voting because payouts are too low is a self perpetuating cycle that can only spiral lower.

"In the highlighted portion of your response, it seems as if though you disagree that large stakeholders are sometimes also quality content creators."

I do specifically address this. It doesn't matter if whales post in a functional system. The stake they possess has no bearing on the quality of their content. If they do post, given that they are well staked, it is ludicrous to suppose that median post payouts might compete with the ROI potential to their stake. However, using stake weighting profiteers are able to gain Steem using manipulation, which destroys the ability of curation to recommend posts based on quality, and extracts inflation from the pool that should be deployed to encourage marketing Steem to raise the price.

They gain more tokens that have less value by profiteering. This is the modus of ninjaminers, that did not buy their stakes with valuable money they decided to invest here, so have no incentive, no experience, to seek capital gains instead of profiteering. In fact, since they did not pay for their tokens, every scrap of value they can extract from their stake is essentially fabricated out of thin air. There's only 100% ROI potential to them. They cannot lose money if the price falls. There's no reason to impute investing competence to devs, and given the profiteering model optimized on Steem, it is strongly implied that they do not grasp that profiteering is contrary to capital gains, since capital gains is far more remunerative than profiteering historically. However they don't care, because any value they receive simply springs from the fact they created the tokens. They are not investors, and profiteering cannot cause them to lose money.

Ex: barbarians did not farm, did not build production facilities, but violently seized the wealth of those productive investors that did. This burden on civilization repeatedly destroyed empires, and as victorious barbarians tried to rule them, they gradually became investors, because they couldn't raid themselves to gain wealth, so had to produce it.

Such examples abound throughout history. Such seizure of wealth is ongoing today. I note that a hostile takeover of a factory in the Ukraine recently was effected with armed gangs. So it goes. Such profiteering always impacts society negatively, retarding capital gains. Steem should be protecting it's content creators from profiteering, but instead encourages profiteers to prey on them, and this produces horrible user retention and all that follows. It's counterproductive.

In timescales relevant, the transformation of barbarian raiders to investors for capital gains took decades, and usually generations. Profiteers on Steem aren't any different from barbarian raiders in terms of that learning curve and timescale. This does not give me confidence that the ninjaminers are going to fix Steem before they destroy it completely. Few examples exist in history of barbarians taking over an empire and not collapsing it, perhaps only Genghis Khan.

The ninjaminers are far more akin to barbarian raiders than the civilizations that rose from pastoral societies, because they just created all the tokens, and did not grow their stakes. Nothing indicates to me they grasp the dichotomy between profiteering and investment. I have been an accredited investor. I do not see that experience reflected in Steem code.

"Hmm, I wonder if paulag's research highlights just how drastically the deflation of the BTC bubble affected the steem retention rate overall. Do you know if he investigated that factor?"

YOY retention has been pretty consistent during BTC's ups and downs. The difference between 7.5% and 5% isn't much, and the difficulty of determining how many actual users there are, dependent on various metrics regarding how recently/often accounts post and etc., makes it an estimate, not an exact number, because so many socks exist. How many? Who knows.

You'll have to look at the data and how it was derived to make those assessments yourself, as the pop of the bubble was after I was interested and attended to the data.

"Again, the "they" I was referencing was self-voters."

That doesn't acknowledge that your hypothesis included both self voters and non self voters. Your statement necessarily included non self voters as those that did not have self esteem or believe they did good work. All of the numbers in an equation are part of the equation. Your statement can be translated into math, which is what I was stating in the above line, and that translation would necessarily include non self voters.

Rigorous principles are necesssary to robust understanding. Understanding that self voting reduces Steem price should inform your voting. Preferring your own accumulation of tokens causes those tokens to have less value. It's not simply a zero sum game. While you or I self voting has little impact on the real world price, because we are not whales, I do not act contrary to my principles because I have integrity and am the change I want to see in the world.

Encouragement is not force. It's a carrot. Discouragement is a stick. Both are necessary, which is why I concede that flags are necessary to Steem. While flags are not force, they're as close as Steem provides. Steem is not separate from the real world. It's a subset of it, and real forces are no less at work here than elsewhere.

It is possible to accumulate tokens by self voting. This causes those tokens to lose value. It is not possible to gain orders of magnitude more tokens by self voting, but it is very possible for those tokens to increase in value by orders of magnitude, mooning.

The only way to moon is to seek capital gains. Profiteering will never, ever cause moon. Only encouraging the growth of the market can possibly do that. Should I self vote, who would not ridicule my principles? No one who cared about principles and my considerations. How much do I benefit from self voting? I dont even care, honestly, but it's certainly negligible. It's vastly more profitable to encourage other content than to seek a tiny increase in my tokens possible by self voting my tiny stake and delegation.