Thanks for this brutally honest analysis of STEEM. Keep 'em coming!!
Just to clarify, the trending page has always been horrendous. Before HF18, when there was a quadratic rshares distribution, large stakeholders (aka "whales") would dominate trending. Now, promotion bots dominate.
So we just switched from one kind of horrendous content to another. I would argue that it's better now because there are more factors that go into the arrangement of trending than it would have been if we had 30 or so large stakeholders in charge of it.
It's an old discussion about influence caps. I think it's improving, but it also has a lot of room to improve.
In terms of dealing with @haejin types, remember that the reward pool is a fixed number. If one @haejin gets $1,000 a day, then another one comes along because they think it's a great idea he gets a large stakeholder to promote him (assuming the stakeholder is in the same league, which is a big if), suddenly they both have to share the same reward pool, and might only get $500 each. Add another, and another. They have to share the same fixed number.
All this to say, the "problem" is self-correcting as popularity increases (assuming everything else like the market price of STEEM stays the same).
RE: Critical Analysis of Steem and Why I'm Invested