Witnesses frequently ran RPC & seed nodes to support the websites & Dapps running on the steam blockchain. Witnesses disabled their nodes when they shut down their witness servers.

well they were not witnesses anymore, they will not get witness rewards, they were accused of being hackers, why would they spend their own money to run nods? would you?
Also them disabling nods make them less influential on steem and less dangerous for the blockchain, so that is certainly not the reason to block private funds.

It seems powering down and selling their steem is a threat to the steem blockchain

nop, it could affect the price of steem but no threat to steem blockchain. it is like you have money in the bank and you want to withdraw it, but bank blocks your account and says that you withdrawing your money is threat to the economy.

They did it to manipulate the market. creating fols price of steem. no threat to steem blockchain here. you can see that they are dumping hive on the market, and hive blockchain still works.

how do you look on @blockbrothers being unvoted as soon as the said that they will not freeze private funds? they were witness no 1 and now they are 50.

I find the thought that the existing witnesses milking are a threat hilarious.

you misunderstood me, i thought old witnesses (accounts that were blocked) milking as a reason to block them. but as you said, there are many other accounts that are doing it and no one is blocking them.

They got what they wanted, removal of @spaminator to flag accounts that systematically milk the reward pool. "Accounts have the right to use their stake any way they wish, including increasing the return on their investment through voting."

new witnesses did that, not old ones. so new witnesses are not fighting spam? is there a reason why should we all not spam now? so i was stupid for not abusing the platform for 2 years? well looks like i was...