A lot of people who have less information than me or who I have not sufficiently explained my decision think that I am overreacting to the situation. So I will just list a few of the factors involved.
The Experiment
This experiment of whales counter-voting whales to enforce a no-whales-voting scheme to me is an act of desperation that is caused by the self-interested resistance of the large stakeholders in Steemit, that has led to their continuing resistance to the elimination of compounding of the vote power calculation. The evidence is abundantly visible that this experiment has resulted in a distribution that is more friendly to new users, without requiring makeshifts like the Steemit Guild and others.
Hacks to work around problems caused by consensus policies that are destructive
Not only the experiment, and @abit and @smooth also, along with a couple of others, have been running policies in their voting on especially top 19, whereby they withdraw votes from top 19s that are having frequent block misses.
This tells me that essentially a proposal that I made some time ago, that there should not be a fixed block of active witnesses paid equally, but rather progressively increasing block allocations, combined with an automated system of lowering the block allocation level for failing witness nodes, to maintain the majority (over 99%) of the time there being no block misses at all.
This is another hack being implemented that tries to work around proven incorrect consensus rules that Steemit, Inc. refuses to address.
The oldest form of this is the Streemian and other vote following systems, guilds, such as Curie and Steemtrail and Christiantrail. This is also a hack, that took a whole year, despite these user-driven workarounds for the compounding vote power calculations for rewards. Like any hack, it does not work well, and Steemit should have paid attention to the continuing mushroom of this kid of efforts from users, and changed the rewards curve.
But no. Nothing.
Arbitrary and un-heralded API changes
It is fair enough to say that the API in a beta software system cannot be entirely relied upon. Some of the calls may not work perfectly, some may not work at all. But when one is working, and it's changed, and it impacts the business of respected users, like @someguy123 and Anonsteem, as HF18 has done, this is literally money being taken away by Steemit from these respected users. Or in other words, yet another sign of disrespect and disinterest in serving the community.
This has also adversely impacted @xeroc's efforts to maintain a python interface to the Steem API. I have personally run into this problem and the workload has been too much for him to keep it up to date. I went to go and use what was working a couple of months earlier, and discovered it was broken - much of the code is broken, and this was because there was pressure put on him over the use of the name Steem, leading to a waste of resources on rebranding.
Selfish actions by high level members and former members of Steemit, Inc.
The most recent one was of Dan Larimer upvoting his own post to put it high on the trending page. He actually said, and if you do the research, you can find evidence of him claiming he would never do this. Dan is probably the worst offender in this, and this was partly why he resigned. It had nothing to do with the software licence, and I can show you a post from him in March 2017 on his blog where he even says that 'a fully open source licence would result in clones' - which would cause what problem exactly? oh yes, him losing his captive userbase, and not being accountable for bad management and breaking his word.
Also, the picture of his own head on the blog there, which I have snapped for posterity, being so big, is an unconscious signal to his readers that he has a narcissistic personality disorder.
Narcissism is a warning sign that people should not ignore, it means that when the situation suits them, they will stab everyone in the back who was loyal to them. That's you, me, and most of the people on the platform.
Conclusion
I did not take this decision lightly, because despite all the massive problems, the platform has stimulated me towards realising life goals, as has happened to many. The bad in it cannot be thrown away with the good, but because Steemit refuse to throw away the bad, we are saddled (like @faddat's analogy of the steem user community being ridden by a cruel and narcissistic and ugly jockey) with an unsatisfactory situation in which we are being steadily turned away from this and I am not the only one who is leaving because of the gross disrespect of the developers of the platform and the management.
I will continue to keep my witness up and running, for what it's worth, until the rental on the server expires, and I expect and don't mind that some of the people who have supported my witness service with their votes will disapprove my witness... I did a lot of work toward getting it solid and dependable, and easy to manage, but I can't justify anymore supporting a platform that is effectively privately owned, and mismanaged - or perhaps more accurately, controlled in order to keep the power in their hands, when they clearly have proven they are irresponsible.