You've amended your comment (initially you said "Steem is based on BitShares") but my point still stands. We are not being asked to fund BitShares development. Instead, we are being asked to use Steem funds to promote BitShares on facebook.
@jonnybitcoin's post has made hundreds of dollars because we have a clear conflict of interests: we have whales (mostly witnesses) who are major BitShares shareholders - I guess that's why they've supported the fundraiser.
I'm going to respectively disagree and say that Steem is based on BitShares. Saying it's based on Graphene is a bit of a sleight-of-hand, IMO. Graphene was developed expressly to be the 2nd version of BitShares, as I'm sure you're aware. I was there for all the verbal gymnastics involved (heck, take a look at the network code that my team wrote, it's line-for-line the same as the code in BitShares).
I agree that the relationship between BitShares and Steem is a quite special.
They not only share the same codebase (which was funded mainly by BitShares shareholders) but also Steem is in large part the result of painful lessons learned by BitShares.
What's interesting is that the flow seems to be reversing: now it's BitShares that is about to take lessons from Steem.
I have amended my comment prior to seeing your reply, and yes, your point still stands, and its a good point. Perhaps I am just biased towards Bitshares, even though I don't hold any.
I do hold BitShares (about 600k BTS), have spent countless hours on the BitShares forum and I really want it succeed. But not by ruining the integrity of Steem.