"...we often lament the fact our posts are not well-received..."

I note that as hard forkery has progressed in the last couple years, increasing financial opportunity for extracting rewards by deploying substantial stake has resulted. EIP will increase the financial incentive to manipulate the rewards mechanism. As encouraging extraction of rewards increases, the ability of the value of content to increase the price of Steem decreases. This further depresses Steem's market cap, and puts downwards pressure on price: capital loss instead of capital gain.

Regardless of how the formula for extracting the value of content deploying stake is tweaked, the incentive to extract rewards from content remains, and this produces capital loss, decline in investment in Steem. EIP increases the potential amount of value that can be extracted, making the problem worse. The solution to the problem is simple: disable profiteering. That leaves only capital gains as a means of benefiting stakeholders and only actual curation (the promotion of content, users, or relationships judged by users as worthy) as a reason to upvote.

Given that extant substantial stakeholders are those profiting from the extant system (it's their current business model and is working for them as a means of increasing their stake) it is easy to see why EIP - rather than any mechanism that will promote capital gains - is being deployed. If I am correct about the problem and why it's happening, substantial stakeholders will increase extraction of rewards, the price of Steem will fall (all else remaining equal in the larger market), Steem will hemorrhage more users, and Steem's market cap will decline. Personally, I expect a significant move in all these metrics and that the exodus of substantial stakeholders will begin in earnest as Steem profiteering ROI is reduced to the point that other opportunities for profiteering will be more attractive. Steem at $.03 will probably eliminate almost all substantial stakeholders in a fairly short time.

If all those metrics instead move to the upside, I will be proved wrong. Does anyone really expect an influx of new users when the rewards potential for content creators is cut in half? Will creators now hanging in here stay when the profitability of bidbots is increased and even more delegations to them are encouraged? I find all the arguments put forward to support EIP either naive or disingenuous.

I am looking past the crash I expect to what will happen thereafter. What I hope is that the tattered remnant of users that refuses to abandon Steem will grasp that profiteering isn't curation; that content is the marketing department of Steem; that capital gains are what has encouraged investment since prehistory, and that Steem will finally limit the ability of substantial stake to extract rewards so that they are able to benefit creators for their content and deliver that value to the price of Steem and produce capital gains.

If that does happen in the aftermath of the economic feeding frenzy that will follow EIP's introduction, then it's not game over for Steem at all, but it's actual birth into the real world of functional financial incentives to meet the goals set forth in the white paper. Then the excellent blockchain and premium use case of social media will finally be unleased, and Steem will moon. Steem is a better currency than BTC, ETH, or almost any competitor on the market today in terms of technicals (if not all competitors), and social media has been proven by the FAANGs to be the most profitable business model in the world today. If profiteers extracting almost all rewards had not made capital gains impossible, I believe Steem would be in the top 5 cryptocurrencies on CMC, and when the appropriate code is implemented, I am confident that will quickly occur.

This is a slim hope, since if I am right, the value of Steem will soon plummet after the introduction of EIP, and the possibility of Steem remaining viable at all will be extremely slim. I am not an optimist, neither a pessimist, but a pragmatist, and history shows that such crashes are but rarely survived in the business world. I'm here still because hope springs eternal, I don't care about my personal wealth, and find the censorship resistance potential of social media blockchain compelling (despite misguided censorship ongoing on front ends. The downvote pool that is included in EIP will make that problem horribly worse overnight. It may be the best recommendation for restoring extant code after HF21).

We'll see what happens.