Thank you for this.  And thank you bernie for pointing this out.  Witness discussion/ "promotion" transparency/ data,  should be on the top priority-list for steemit.  It's kind of a strange paradox of "decentralization--" things can become very insular, making dissemination of information diffcult--all the while, a blockchain, by its very design--ensures some form of "solidarity" or uniformity "across all nodes" (as has been explained above--if I 'm understanidng correctly).  This, imo, is the problem with DPOS.  At least with EOS they *kind of* seemed to have some sort of "voting"/ procedure to determine block producers--although I could only imagine what a put-on all that could have been.  Unfortunately, I'm not close enough to the tech to truly know.  But I'm doing my best to learn.