Hey, thanks for your support and the kind words!
About that "disabled forever" message – that's not a ban. It shows up for any witness whose node hasn't finished syncing yet and hasn't produced a block. My node is running and currently synchronizing, which takes a while with the Steem blockchain. Once it's done and signs its first block, the message will disappear. I'm still receiving votes and currently sitting at rank 63 – if I were actually banned, that wouldn't be possible.

And yes, you're right – I was pretty frustrated back then. But you know what, frustration alone doesn't fix anything. I thought to myself: Either I keep complaining, or I do something about it. So now I'm doing something.

There's a lot of disappointment on this platform, from many people. But that's just how life works – if you want things to get better, you have to take action yourself. And that's exactly what I'm doing now.
My plan is simple: A new tool or app every month, something that anyone can actually use. Nothing over the top, but things that have real value. SteemSnap and SteemYum are already live, and I have much more planned – a simplified signup system, micro-payments, a developer kit. These concepts have existed for years, I even started working on some of them, but then I lost the motivation.
What changed? Facebook. I'll be honest: With my monetized accounts there, I was regularly making 600 to 800 dollars a month, in good months up to 1,500. Then Facebook's AI decided I was publishing scam content – because I wanted to give away chocolate. Monetization stripped, just like that. No explanation, no way to fix it.

For making money, Facebook is definitely better suited than Steem. But Steem has something Facebook doesn't: No censorship. For the average user, that's a huge advantage.
And if we can simplify the system here so that you can sign up with just an email address – no keys, no master password, no technical knowledge required – then we'll see new faces here again. That's exactly what I'm going to build in the coming weeks, and it will come faster than you think.
You can barely make money here at the current price anyway, so that shouldn't be the motivation. My intention isn't to become a top 20 witness either – I don't care about that. I need the node as infrastructure for my apps, and maybe I'll get a bit more reach and some people will check in to see what I'm up to.

Thanks again for your vote and your trust. It's motivating.