Well, content rewards make up 65% of the pot. 10% go to witnesses, which is fine because their role is crucial and we don't want incompetent and easily bribed people occupying their position. 15% go to Hive Power holders. 10% goes to the Hive Proposal System.

Half of the content rewards are for content creators, which means that 47.5% of the rewards on this platform do not have to depend on the stake a user has at all. The roughly a half do only makes sense because you want to give HP holders a reason to keep their coins staked.

The EIP implemented last September struck a pretty good balance between stakeholders' and content creators' interests. There are many powerful curation projects and individual curators on the platform who are happy not to sell their votes and curate for free. The system really by and large works now.

10% of the entire reward pool going to 20 people is quite a lot, which means that the coveted spot of being a consensus witness must be earned. Thanks to Steemit, Inc wasting a lot of money in 2017 and 2018 in particular instead of accumulating a sizable war chest, STEEM was dumped hard in late 2018 and 2019, which resulted in a much more decentralized stake distribution than before. Thanks to it, the middle class has enough power to be able to heavily influence witness voting.

Most witnesses should be competent and productive developers particularly during crypto bull markets when the price of HIVE can go obscenely high. Paying someone $500,000 (when HIVE is $4) a year for running a couple of servers just won't do. It is not just Steemit, Inc that dumped a shitload of coins in 2018. Witnesses did it, too. At $500,000 a year, a Hive witness who develops a front end could pay a professional UX designer if that is not their own core competence, for example.