If you are doing an Airdrop this big, you guys should have tested it out very well before rolling it out for the masses. Bots were easily able to take ref rewards of other users.
Also, I wanted to inform you that I gamed your system by creating new accounts. You guys should have restricted the Airdrop to at least 40 rep users (50 would be more ideal).
Common, show some concern for genuine people with 40 and 30 reps! Already, the reward for those's been splashed because of people 'gaming the system.' Suggesting they should be left out altogether isn't fair please.
There are other ways to verify people with lower rep, such as post count, powered up steem, account creation date, number of followers etc. They could use those to reward people with lower rep but who are active steem users.
But leaving exploits just to show "concern for genuine people with 30 reps" will make a bad impression on potential investors. This will affect the success of the coin.
We were very aware of all potential exploits from the get-go. As you say yourself, an airdrop of this size doesnt just happen over night and without careful thought. One thing i didnt foresee, though, was the internal debate in the Steem community about the platform not sufficiently preventing low quality content and spam of all sorts. The airdrop obviously caused quite a lot of users jumping through hoops for higher reputation, and apparently that hasnt been so pretty. I can definitely say, that our aim was to encourage higher quality and more engagement from Steem users.
All investors in Byteball are aware of the undistributed funds, and that all of it is to be distributed for free. I am sure that when the dust settles, this Steem campaign will have proven to be far more valuable than the initial airdrops to BTC holders. We have already seen impressive amount of content being created and people engaging on Byteball communities. Needless to say, some of the exploits caught the attention of developer communities like thebot.net and Utopian. Having developers become aware of a platform allowing anyone to build on top of it really isnt all that bad.