Interesting view, partially I agree.
Well, seems I am the most active here in no. of posts, comments and upvotes, because my comments are not bot-triggered but all manual, same with most of my curating. So feel free to vote for me.

So, in my opinion and quite frankly. I believe the current decline in content quality that the hive blockchain is showing today is all their fault for not doing their job properly.

Has your Hive been stolen? Have you been unable to access your account or the blockchain?

Sounds like they are doing their job. Making posts about flowers, patting you on the back, talking about their favorite movie, or making it rain on other users is not the job of a witness. A witness's job is to keep the blockchain secure, running, determine if code changes are in the best interest of the blockchain, and get things back up and running when there is a problem.

We produce blocks and keep the blockchain running and secure. We are not politicians or entertainers.

That's a nice summary, but I think it's already well known and people don't seem to care, as long as the system is running smoothly and the witnesses seem to be doing a good job about that at the moment. Also your summary only reflects one snapshot in time, so some witnesses may have done something for Hive at some point or may be doing so in a different context or without publicly talking about it.

Additionally, a "live" version of the earnings is available over at https://primersion.com/earnings.

Congratulations! Yours post has been automatically curated by….

Just kidding. On a more serious note, Hive has become a community with its own culture and mannerisms, sometimes it is quirky but I learned to like it and I do realize outsiders may not understand us at first, and some never at all. I agree that the amount of bots and automation is frustrating, it is unstoppable so can only be fought by better (and more powerful) organic content curation.

Our witnesses have indeed been focusing a lot on code and infrastructure, it is a blockchain made by programmers and led by programmers so it makes sense that their hyper focus is on tech. I agree with your point that more focus should be given to quality organic-like content rather than just technology, but honestly I have no idea how that can be done because I probably tend to think more like a programmer myself (because I am one). Maybe we need a product development/improvement team or something like that? Makes no sense to me but I am open to support new ideas as I am a user that wants to see more diverse content to find new friends and communities.

So you raise a lot of agreeable points, but I still struggle to find solutions or paths for improvements that (specially) the top witness should implement, that is the kind of discussion I would like to read about, what in practice they could do. To me some curation trails may help bring into the spotlight newer and better creators and some top witnesses have a lot of power to upvote them, but other than that I am clueless about what would bring more organic quality content. We, as a community, need to both bring more people to both consume and create better content, but the path to achieve the goal right now is not exactly laid down by the devs because they focus on tech mostly (although Hive does have good products, I use them myself and I like them)

Maybe if people powered up what they were given rather than dump as quick as they get it, or even just not powering down to dump, and we could have decentralized some of the power here.
Instead, too many dump what they get into the hands that already have too much.
We get the community we create.
Gangs reap the pool because people aren't wise enough to avoid them.

My $51 a month pays my $40 server fee for running my HIVE client and leaves me a solid $11 profit..

I will try my best to vote on people to spread the wealth more. Haven't actively voted in a while.