Not sure what I have to contribute here, but this post feels like it deserves a response, so lets see where this goes. I agree with much of what you wrote, but of course, not everything. It's interesting to me how your conclusion made this point:

We need a system worth staying in.

Which is almost the exact point that I made in a post yesterday

What is the one single thing that anyone can do to make STEEM more valuable and lead us into that future? Maybe it's this. Do what I can at this very moment to make the Steem ecosystem into a place where people want to spend their time and attention.

I'm not into gaming, so I haven't tried Cryptid Hunter, but I hope it succeeds. I'm in favor of anything that cultivates genuine human attention.

It's obviously not possible to do a point by point response to your whole post, so I'll focus on two that resonated the most with me. First, I agree that the absence of reliable documentation is a big challenge for developers. This actually seems like it should be easy to address by freelancers through the SPS. Before the Hive split, people used to generate proposals to refresh the docs. It would be great to see that resume. This seems like an ideal task for SPS funding.

Second, marketing, I disagree that we need marketing right now. This is because I agree with your other point that the basic growth cycle is not functioning:

new user → onboarding → engagement → expansion

Until we are retaining a good chunk of the people who find their way here, I don't think marketing is a good use of time and funding. If we bring people here just to have them leave, that leads to reputational damage. And that leads back to the reason why (I believe) your delegation bot comment got the response that it did.

I won't try to speak for anyone else, but personally, I have always been a fan of automation here, as long as it is used to promote growth and value - and I don't even object to reasonable self-voting. However, the current generation of delegation bots doesn't promote growth and value. They're cannibalizing the ecosystem. So, my personal opinion is that we cannot have a healthy culture while that generation of voting service is controlling so much of the reward distribution. (It's the technology, not necessarily the people.)

I get that people use them, and you want to advise your clients about the existing services that they could make use of, but that also counterbalances almost everything else that you wrote up above. IMO, there is no way to "open a new path" without removing or replacing that generation of voting service. (which is why I have been working on a gen-5 service - not sure if you've seen my posts on this topic...) I have no problem sharing the ecosystem with automatons that pursue ecosystem growth, but I don't want to share it with automatons whose only apparent goal is to exfiltrate whatever value has so-far managed to survive.

In the end - on the delegation bot topic, I guess you're sort-of caught in the middle, since you have to serve your clients, but promoting services like that is diametrically opposed to the chain's fiduciary interest.

Anyway, thanks for the post; thanks for bringing Cryptid Hunter here, and thanks for the other projects you have launched. Hopefully conversations like this will uncover some new and healthier paths for the ecosystem.