Time will tell if they've truly earned their place, won't it? I suspect that they've somewhat over-compensated early adopters. The interesting thing is that there's nothing stopping a consortium of dissatisfied minnows from creating their own Steem clone from scratch and designing whatever compensation scheme they want.

If someone clones Steem and it attracts a lot of attention away from the original Steem, then we'll know that the rich have overcompensated themselves. It's as simple as that.

For my part, I don't harbor any resentment towards the system's founders, but I know a lot of them from Bitshares and have a lot of respect for them. That's not true of most of the minnows here.