As I have said many times, founders posting platform updates getting high rewards is exploitative and impairs the ability of Steem to reward other users by depleting the reward pool.
What about all other posts in the meta category: posts about new features in the GUI, new third party tools, explanations how bots work, presentations on Steem statistics etc? If you think the devs should not be allowed to earn anything from "posting platform updates", then, if we want to stay consistent, all other similar posts by other people should also be treated in a similar way.
I find @dan's posts quite useful. Most of them are not pure announcements - they give me a valuable insight about @dan's motivations, explain the whole context, and explain what problems he identified and why he had to reject alternative solutions. If they were pure announcements, then yes, they don't deserve much payout. But these are not just "platform updates".
So, you think a few short posts about how voting philosophy is informing evolving designs for the Steem platform are a good use of $12000 from the reward pool, as opposed to, say, rewarding 120 good-but-currently-unrewarded posts $100 each? You are entitled to that view, but I respectfully disagree.
We must admit that almost all financial rewards here in Steem are disconnected from the "real world" value. Yes, $12000 is well overpriced if we compare it to the outside world prices, but so are many other posts and comments, including mine.
I think it will be very difficult to draw a line between platform update announcements and educational blog posts describing somebody's thought process. For me, @dan's posts fall more or less half way between those two extremes.