I'd be down to burn, having nobody at the helm a lot of time is awful though.

What do you mean by what now? I'm interested what that expectation is. I'd also be interested to why you want someone at the helm of a decentralized movement. The goal here is to remove even myself from being the force behind #sportstalk and instead serve to make Steem the home for everyone interested in talking about sporting content.

As for the referees they are not being asked to run a business. They are being asked to moderate the content under #sportstalk for abuse. I don't know when I've asked more from any of the referees. That being said they are paid for this responsibility as you mentioned above with an equivalent of 5% of token inflation. This has to date been paid from @sportsprojects rather than additional inflation. This is serving to lower the print inflation and distributing existing funds for uses without expanded printing.

While the community coming together to downvote posts is a great aspect to see it's not something that is sustainable to fight abuse. This was made evident early on which was why the focus on building a successful referee team has been the largest focus thus far. It is required to make sure that little abuses that would often be overlooked don't let the community die by a thousand little cuts. Instead the community can focus on aligning rewards based on what is actually valuable to them while referees go after the abusers. This is equivalent to the model that Steem has benefited from by supporting @steemcleaners.

When it was clear early on that abuse was going to overtake quality content without successful moderation I reached out to an existing referee to begin operating @sportsmod.  They done an amazing job fighting off numbers of abusers and keeping the community's focus tied strongly to sporting content but it was far too much to ask of one person. Not only that but leaving one person's point of view was far too centralized in my opinion. 

That's when work on the referee project began. This took the concept of a moderation account but allowed the account to be controlled by a group that was forced to gain consensus. This solved the problem of one person's voice being the only voice determining what spam was.

This still left a major problem as pointed out by users when the community guidelines was announced. I was requiring the community to only trust in my determination for who could perform this role. That's lead to work on the future of the referee system which will put SPORTS stakeholders in complete control over who the referees serving are.