I like how you did a pro/con break down of the issue. I'm not a fan of pay for votes, but I do support minnowbooster as I think the idea of spreading around massive whale SP to a bunch of smaller accounts makes sense because whales simply can't do that level of curation on their own. I also like that they cap it to 1 SBD a day to prevent abuse.

I like your pros and especially the idea of gamification which essentially moves this whole discussion to a different category because there's no more payment (unless we're going to argue good content is also a payment, which to me is silly).

We have the tools we need to oppose bad content that gets upvotes from pay-for-votes. There's no reason we can't have pay-for-flags.

Well, the reason is in the Pro list you mentioned. It's expensive to pay for flags so people will not be motivated to do so unless their is systemic risk through pay for votes to the point where pointless content is getting rewards and those creating valuable to the network content (i.e. content that will be shared and bring in more users to increase the network effect) will simply leave. At that point, people will start flagging, but will it be too late by then? Many already have the perception that content on Steemit is "crap". Pay for votes may only make that worse. Systemic risk is much more dangerous for everyone than other forms of risk.

I'm a bit confused by this:

They assume it's like a zero-sum game and go from this false assumption.

The rewards pool... is zero sum. That's how it works. If rewards are given to one post, then fewer rewards go to all the others for that same pay period. Am I missing something there?