Before Hive was Hive it was in the top 100. The mighty have fallen, and you note some of the reasons why. Flags aren't all bad, but they're sure not all good either. I'm unaware of a good author on the platform that hasn't been targeted by significant stake from time to time, for reasons that only deprecate the platform. Until Hive is perfected, we'll have to take the good with the bad, is the best I can resolve.

A problem Hive faces is that it's in a world in which stake rules supreme, and Hive will not succeed without significantly enabling stake to substantially incentivize folks to use it. This is a balancing act, and the OP is almost exclusively intent on enabling curators to better balance the deployment of stake via rewards, because a great many very destructive forces are unleashed on society through extractive processes that cause stake to oppress and deprecate far more valuable matters to society.

At this point in time, I can only hang in here and hope better minds than mine continue to seek solutions to problems that continue to negatively impact Hive, not in terms of token price, but in terms of the society that imparts value to that token. Until there are means of valuing more important and valuable aspects of society better than mere stake, Hive will struggle with over-valuing stake, and all the consequences that has to society, just like IRL.

At least greedy whales can't extract my organs and profit from selling them on Hive, so there is a limit to the potential negatives that Hive can inflict on society. Sometimes even the most acquisitive stakeholder recognizes that their stake only has value in society, and acts to strengthen society instead of maximizing their ROI. Until the balance is so far out of whack Hive cannot exist, or is perfected and conquers the world, I intend to persist here, in the hope that our mutual interactions of our own free will enable freedom to increase and happiness in the world increase as a result.