Honestly, I’m really disappointed by this as well, but yea, not sure what more there is to say. In the latest voting round for Citizen House Badgeholder nominations they have used their 2.2M to vote for themselves, and only themselves.
This has means they have simply given themselves a position in the top 10 and therefore a citizenship badge. Again, there were no rules against doing this, but it just seems to continue the pattern of self-serving descisions, which presumably we should expect to continue whenever the opportunity arises.
Like you said above, Synthetix should have a large role in Optimism, they are one of the key protocols around which so much is built… but that power should be allocated by the community as it is for everything else, not just taken by them every time there is no explicit rule preventing it. I’m sure they think it is for the ‘Greater Good’ for them to have as much control as they can, but I fundementally believe it is never a sensible idea to let the powerful decide how much power they should have, even if they really are good actors (which I do think they probably are).