Great post. I see Steem as a big experiment. It will either evolve and continue, or something will evolve to compete with it and it will fade. Your paragraph that begins:

"But the worst part of this culture is that bad ideas, faulty code, and poor behavior is often blindly supported and accepted because criticism is not handled well by those being criticized and because those who criticize are targeted and shunned by many different people and groups within the community..."

is spot on, not just for HF20 and witnesses, but for Steem as a whole. It hit me recently that in traditional economies, one of the biggest problem is that those with the most money rule, and typically rule in their own favor. Unfortunately, Steem, by being set up to be proof of stake, not proof of brain, is suffering from the same problems, only they are even more extreme because Steem's Gini index is close to 1. This means that there is an extreme oligarchy on Steem, along with a hierarchy of control: a few can easily downvote others out of existence for no logical reason, other than to retain power.

But as I said, Steem is an interesting experiment. I would like to see Steem move more in the direction of something like Stack Exchange, which overall has far higher quality content. Can the ideas there be combined with ideas from Steem to get the best of both worlds? Can we shift from proof of stake, to proof of brain, but somehow reward those who have invested more? Or do those who have more SP really need to be rewarded more? If they are not meaningfully engaging, why should they?

With respect to Witnesses and HF20, I suggest a different model prior to each HF: the witnesses post what they are doing to test and their results/opinions on the HF at least one month prior to the go live date. That would give users a chance to shift votes to witnesses who show that they are truly engaged.

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