What a post that took me 15 minutes to read 🤣 I'm not as certain about the part:

I mean at this point it's even difficult to imagine Justin didn't know about this

Ned's got a lot of flaws, but he's a good scammer when he has to be, using the fact that he was putting out 800,000 STEEM per month on the exchange, I don't think it was extremely hard to get Justin to swallow anything that was in a weak position and make him believe that those STEEM could be used any way he wanted. He was already baited and in demand for a great deal. At least that's what I think.

It's sure that if these funds had at least been split in two, one part for development via Steemit and the other on an independent and real marketing company (SteemPromote) in charge of advertising budgets things would have been different, now what's done is done and there's no point in looking back but moving forward because as they say in the country where I was born "with some ifs we could put Paris in a bottle".