This comment right here that you wrote is the poster child for what is wrong with this entire subreddit and why it's a lost cause.
Contest mode is nothing but a censoring tool for proper discussion.
No one is being censored by any reasonable definition of the word. Contest mode just randomizes the sort order so it's harder for people to scroll down to the bottom and just mass downvote people out of the discussion.
You can still talk and post just fine, you can have discussion you just have to look a bit harder to find the people you want to down vote and your friends to cirlce up with and start jerking. People are just spitting the dummy over nothing or having a tantrum they can't jerk themselves off seeing someone being downvoted for not understanding what the big deal is. Just children who've had their toy taken away.
The vast majority of people here hate the EGS, and rightly so, because it's shit. The vast majority of posts that praise it are 'shilly' and offer nothing to a discussion, and are rightly downvoted.
Your first part is an opinion, one that funnily enough I agree with. EGS is shit and what they are doing is wrong.
However absolutely no proof has been leveled that the vast majority of people being even remotely pro EGS were 'shills'. At best there is a bit of a counter circle jerk in the other direction because of the absolutely vapid amount of hatred people have garnered over a piece of fucking software and a company doing what capatalism do.
I have seen people down voted just for asking questions and have seen reasonable discussion silenced and people called shills for almost no reason. Every EGS thread is the definition of a circle jerk with all the same shit being said ad nuseum and anyone who doesn't toe the line gets fucking swamped for it.
Sometimes this place gets a little too 1984 and it ruins the sub.
Ah yes my favorite part of 1984 where Winston in the Ministry of Truth had all his comments put into a random order with the popularity of those comments being hidden. Yet all the information was fully accessible just sorted differently. That's definitely relevant to things that actually happen in the novel.