One of the few posts on this I've read that actually sounds reasonable. So thank you for that...

Having been through a couple of mergers/takeovers in completely unrelated businesses, my thought is that Justin wants to make money. My second thought is that this deal possibly went off a little prematurely, because Justin wanted to use the news of the merger to drown out the news about Dan's "Voice" project going into public Beta on February 14th. And that mission was definitely accomplished.

The "version" of this I've been putting out there goes something like this:

Justin buys Steemit, Inc. and control of the approximately 75M Steem/SP in Steemit, Inc. controlled accounts. He effectively pays maybe 25c per Steem for that.

He brings TRON's considerable resources and marketing power to bear on the Steem ecosystem in a way we've never seen before. Maybe he spends as much as US $25M. As a result, the Steemosphere goes from floundering in the dark to becoming A Really Big Deal.

As a result, the price of Steem rises to maybe $8-10, because now everyone wants to get onboard. Even after expenses, Justin makes more than half a BILLION dollars on his investment. That's not chump change.

Like you, I am yet to see the Sacred Cow of Decentralization actually be functional. I think it's a beautiful ideal but when applied to a large scale project like Steem, the entire decision-making-by-consensus process takes on some of the less desirable characteristics of Communism... including that there's more talk and planning about "moving forward" than actual moving forward. But I'm open to the possibility that I don't fully understand how it's supposed to work...