Appreciate your comment - I'd agree that focus is better and may have some better business sense to it. After all, companies like Paypal only managed to really get their first leg through the door when they shifted focus on selling their services to the top players in eBay.

Back to Steemit, that "focus" phase has already happened during the pre-July 4th launch. Back then it was mostly about cryptos, government, and musings about Steemit. However, I wouldn't call what happened back then to be bottom up. The top influencers were definitely seeding the early adopter's accounts, quite directly from top down.

Anyway, decentralisation (in a social sense) necessarily means diversity. The focused, heavily-centralised phase is over. Perhaps it can even resume back to the way it is, but the network has to grow into a social media platform. And there will be cost requirements to come up with cognitive-mining pools (curation guilds) to help top influencers put value into the many accounts that are coming in. In that case, the decisions are actually made from the bottom up since our field curators and proxy voters are working together to call the shots. And as cost optimisation, process automation catches up - we will see a dissolution in curation guilds, perhaps into smaller chunks.

I may be biased being involved in the curation group, but I don't think such efforts are contributing to the decline. No doubt this is just a band-aid approach. Ideally, the whales should bust their asses day and night doing their best to reward good content creators. Fact is, most whales are miners, and aren't necessarily equipped with the skills and especially, time to do DD checks and reward diverse contents. Curation groups enable power distribution with more pairs of eyes and brains to do the job. And there are already signs of specialised curation groups, and steemtrails is one of it. Hopefully by seeding a breadth of small accounts, there will be a greater organic curation especially when Steem price catches up again to better market evaluation.