I know Mikebert sometimes posts things because he likes to be controversial, but I thought I would respond to the points he raised in his daylog, as these are legitimate concerns that other users may have, and so far there has not really been much explanation of the reasoning behind some of these changes, except perhaps in the catbox, which not all users pay attention to.
Eliminating the Vote-Dumping Bonus
I agree with Mikebert that low-level users such as himself probably almost never abused it. The problem was more with the high level users. As Mikebert himself points out, how are you possibly going to read 105 or 125 writeups in one day? And yet we know for a fact that many, many high level users were using all their votes just to get the bonus, and this inevitably meant that they were voting on things without actually reading them. We wanted to eliminate the incentive to blindly vote on writeups without reading them, in order to strengthen the feedback system and make it actual feedback. It is also important to note that in combination with the elimination of the vote-dumping bonus, we also increased the chance of getting XP from voting from 18% to 33%. Mikebert's personal experience may vary, but so far we have not seen much drop off in votes being cast, if any.
Time required to advance to higher levels
It is simply not true that "the road from level 2 to level 5, 6 or more got a lot longer." If you take a look at the actual numbers, the road just got a lot shorter, if anything! With the XP award for submitting a writeup increased from 1 XP to 5 XP, you can pretty much get to level 5 just on the XP from the writeups alone! This is before we even take into account XP from voting, positive rep, C!s, etc. For example, getting to level 5 currently requires 200 writeups and 1000 XP. If you could somehow just post the 200 writeups without getting any votes or C!s and never voting yourself, you would still get to level 5 automatically upon submission of the 200th writeup. And what is even more, so far we haven't upped the XP loss for having a writeup deleted from 1 XP, so even your failures will get rewarded with 4 XP!
The E2 Gift Shop and the Wheel of Surprise
The Gift Shop and the Wheel were primarily intended for higher level users who have tons of XP to spare. As described above, by the time a user gets to levels 3, 4, and 5, they are going to start having more XP than they know what to do with, so we wanted to give them something fun to do with it. We don't really intend newbies to be blowing all their hard-won XP on these just yet, which is precisely why you can't buy C!s until level 3.
Piracy Quest
As for the Piracy Quest, in a few weeks all of the crap will be gone and only the gems will remain. I think most people would agree that getting those gems is certainly worth putting up with a bit of crap for a few weeks.