Intentions are frankly invisible and unknowable. 

IMO (though still not knowable) the primary intention of the whole ordeal was restoring Ned and Dan's accounts after they lost them by being extremely irresponsible. The primary cause of the loss was not a bug, as such (broad category of) bugs were entirely foreseen and even expected, and may well happen again even now. It was irresponsibility on the part of Dan and Ned. All of us at the time, including you, were well aware of the importance of using a posting key to access the web site with large accounts, and not an owner key.

The 'property rights' of those who were not irresponsible and stood to lose (and probably in some cases did lose) as a result of their actions were considered less important by an unaccountable central party who decided thus unilaterally and without even giving witnesses as chance to balance the competing interests. That sort of unilateral authority and action (which still exists) is a bigger existential threat to the blockchain than a broken web site leaking keys which never should have been put in the web site in the first place.

> You don't see working to restore suspected compromised accounts an act of protecting property rights?

Protecting _some_ property rights by compromising _others_, where the central authority gets to decide which take precedence over others? Not really sure I am sold on that vision of 'property rights', in fact I'm pretty sure I am not sold on it.

> As I said in my post, I wasn't a witness at the time and yes, I know Steemit was using their stake to vote for witnesses prior to HF17

No, that is a different matter. Some Steemit employees were voting, including (but I believe not entirely) with stake that was vested from the ninja-mine.

In the case of HF9, it was the literal `steemit` account which immediately and without warning or discussion voted out all witnesses and pushed through the fork which reset keys on a wide swath of accounts, some compromised, some not. The witness discussion on the topic was literally "What's going on?" There is no way that you can say witnesses supported it, because there was no discussion or voting.

As I stated, there was a very real risk that I and others could have had our property lost and that only didn't happen due to luck (in my case a difference of a few hours). Steemit unilaterally decided that their own 'property rights' (really a misnomer when viewed through the lens of being the subject of one party's arbitrary decision) were more important than mine and others'.