While I agree with many parts of your evaluation, I gotta say that justifying burnpost and sbdpotato doesn't really help, either. If the supply of any given good is pre-determined (and both these experiments have a tiny effect on the overall supply of STEEM / SBD), then demand will be the driving force behind the market price.

Clearly, price of STEEM has been going down not only due to the increasing supply, but more so because the demand hasn't kept up. How can the community foster demand? Clearly not by promoting frequent spam posts to be visible. And surely also not by taking a chunk of the rewards which have been meant to reward good content. In that respect, this article deserves more payout than any of those "experiments".

What bothers me most, though, is that sbdpotato / burnpost take up significant portions of the community's attention. Instead of discussing and building solutions to make Steem a better platform / community, we're caught up talking about promoted spambots. This is sad, as it's like trying to close a volcano crater with a chewing gum.