Caveat: I can't predict the future, and definitely can't advise anyone on investing.
I don't have a huge stake in Steemit but in my opinion some tweaking of the system is probably a good thing. I personally think we should move to a one person one vote system with staked sp just giving you daily interest. That will probably not happen, it would require a few things like an oracle to ensure people ddn't just create 1000 bots. I think this would help get better blogs to the top
I have also seen a few people suggest changing rewards so that you would get more for curation. IMO not the worst idea as there are people who just upvote 9 of their own comments every day, if we could encourage those people to upvote other peoples posts with better curation profits I think there there would be more upvotes spread around.
I personally think steemit is going to be a round a while even if SMT's fail. In investigating other "coins for posting" sites I don't see any potentially overtaking us any time soon. Something catastrophic like complete system meltdown would probably have to happen. I see whales cashing out as a chance for new people to move up the ladder, this is your chance to move up the ladder. But I can't say for sure what the future will bring, i'm in for the long haul!
Well nobody at least that I know of wants Steem to fail, but look at the example you place of the guy who upvotes himself 9 times daily and gets 25% curation rewards, wouldn't it seem logical to you that with a 50% reward this guy would probably post more articles and upvote himself even more as the rewards are better?
There would have to be some controls, it seems the idea to change things never gets much traction as the people making the most steem have the most power and least incentive to change.