How distributed is the steem protocol?

Today the devs forced a hardfork to v9 in the blink of an eye. I'm assuming the fork was pushed to fix issues discovered during the 'hack' but that's besides the point. The developers of Steem hold so much SP that they can take over the vast majority of witness slots at will and that is the real problem.

Here's a screenshot of tonights witnesses:

This means they have the power to alter or revert transactions, votes, submissions, take anyone's tokens or pretty much do anything they please at any time. This should not be taken lightly if we want to have a truly distributed, democratic, censorship-resistant protocol.

You can all help by voting for witnesses - preferably in a way that helps distribute the power over the protocol.

Thank you!