At first glance KE clearly looks like a great indicator against people (or rather, accounts) who try earning by posting and curating and cashing out. But just as you say, it's actually severely broken. It would be OK in the first months/years of... STEEM. Yes. That far in time. But now? with side tokens?

With this naiive understanding of KE as advertised, this account of mine is a precious angel of Hive. KE of 0.07 at the time of writing, and don't even have a circle of friends here to chat on the chain (ppl still afraid of cryptocoins, etc). Well, yes. This is not a 'reward milking' account for sure, but .. can't really say it's active either. Years passed and I still haven't evolved the knack for writing.. Say, I unstake now and convert the value into curation-trail tokens and stake them instead. Boom, I evolved abysmall KE because I support some community! yay!

Anyways. But even this take is actually taking it shallow. KE is a ratio, a percentage. Even if we wanted to do a witch hunt against earners/milkers, say, who's worse for the chain and growth, an account with high KE with low HP that posts regularly and cashes out rewards as well, or a low KE account that cashes out far more but has HP high enough to keep KE low?

Simple metrics based on ratios are "easy to understand". Everyone thinks they understand ratios, but most don't, just like most don't understand geometric progression/exponents. While 'the human brain' gets the former far better and almost properly, mant just don't immediately notice that 1% of 10 dollars, 1% of a dime, and 1% of a million are not just the same "just the same small 1% of the whole". Yes, 1% is the same small 1%, but the ratio that people don't get is the ratio of 10$ to 1mil$ and that the true value of a part of something grows with the scale of growth of the whole. If you ever had your brain do this to you, or saw your friends' saying "oh, it's just 1%, yeah of million, but just 1% no big deal" and then counting the zeroes and gasping, you know what I'm referring to..

Making a good indicator of "how much one's draining" is not easy.. Showing KE here right in the face smells to me to be huge incentive for a witch hunt, because it's **too easy** to just look at the value and not think where it comes from, and that's all what's really needed. I hope I'm wrong.

Yep the placement on PeakD doesn't sound like a good idea at all. At best it should belong in analytics page to not overload the main profile with unnecessary details.