I have been watching DeepOnion too, and also following it on deep onion.org. It looks to me like the members who are "In" the airdrop try especially hard to not let anyone else in, in order to not share the spoils of their making.
This might be fine, but I think the shortsighted way they are going about this will have a very negative longer term impact on the project as a whole. Not only will there be more limited distribution but there will be a long tail of people who will snipe and badmouth the project every step of the way.
Just my opinion from reading the posts - which by the way is a pay because the project itself could go places if greed wasn't so obvious.
I get the exact opposite impression. People are quite disappointed that there are so few new people accepted in the airdrop. Note that it might also be out of self-interest, more participants will help the value down the line.
We are not the ones making the rules and we are not the ones blacklisting people. We help people follow the rules and check all the boxes to get in.
I think most members like us have actually been consistently suggesting loosening of the rules to let new people in. The more distributed the coin is is definitely correlated to how successful the project will ultimately be imo. Having a few hundred people control the majority of the supply is never good imo. The devs are doing a good job and have gotten this project very far already. Just reading the eBTC fiasco gives me a new appreciation for the onion team.