Welcome back and congrats to the new job! :)
As you may have noticed, I received the changes of HF 21 with mixed feelings. Beside good effects (self-votes are less attractive than before, 'bitbotted' shit posts are getting flagged, abusers are getting flagged) it is a fact than many small and middle sized users earn significantly less than before. Just follow the (many) comments in the weekly posts of @double-u (I suggest you to check the last few ones) and you will see what I mean (people commenting there are respected Steemians like for example @chriddi).
It is true that some whales or former bid bot services are curating manually now, but they are just not aware of the less known users ... you need to have reached a certain 'level of fame' to get their attention.
A positive exception is @curangel run by @pharesim which really is upvoting small accounts (which you easily can check with SteemWorld).
Of course I also still see poeple crying around about the hardfork.
Neither in German nor in English the verbs "cry" and "criticize" are synonyms. I think it's just unfair to let it appear they were. :)
In every big project (objective and constructive) criticism is badly needed for improvements and precious part of the process of further development.
But to be honest, it mainly comes down to two groups of users: ...
As pointed out above, here I have to disagree.
Sure, not everyone seems to benefit immediately - But I have seen many good posts from smaller users rewarded quite big as well. And I hope, curation gets better and better. I still think we are on the right way. :)
But yeah, I was a little bit hard to equal crying with criticizing. Without critique, we probably wouldn‘t even have those changes.
Thank you for your comment!