RE: The Snowball Effect on STEEM.
Well, I honestly think it's a given consequence of how Steem have been in the past, how users have behaved and how easy it has been to accumulate Steem.
What you can regret nowadays is that you didn't jumped on the bandwagon and bid-botted each of your posts to extreme rewards, as you could've done so to rapidly grow your account. By doing so in the past, you would be much better off nowadays... But, that is only if you powered up your account.
I would never allow greed to steer my actions though, which is the main reason for me to never have behaved like that. I also think it shows your character to avoid certain types of behaviour, and I believe in some sort of karma, so I think it will yield me better results further on.
It's very unfortunate though, that many are so extremely concerned and focused on the price. Things would be a lot better if people powered up at least some of the rewards before cashing out.
Even if I bid-botted the shit out of every post way back and was better off now. I would still not take more out than I needed, I would never want to lose my stake. So I think it would have benefitted me and others if I did that :p and well the tax on exchanging crypto is like the tax on trade stocks in Denmark. Not cheap x)