"One thing is clear though. In Steemit's present state, it functions like a caste system."

Great, thought-provoking point.

"The ones who want to amass great wealth are not always the ones you want to watch the sheep at night."

This could not be more true.

I personally think one of our greatest problems is that the system with linear voting rewards provides huge incentive to hoard the maximal amount of rewards votable by your stake for yourself. This creates a whole culture of vote-trading, vote-buying, back-room deals, and unspoken vote-for-vote. If these are going to happen, the more transparent and public the better. That way, political will for consensus changes can hopefully be reached.

Because of the relative anonymity of the internet, you cannot create a typical system to combat this "abuse", if the community can even collectively define it. As a result, scattered community enforcement only shames the few willing to follow the rules, leaving the egregious to reap the rewards.

That's what I was getting at today in my post where you mentioned some of the ideas you expanded upon here.

I have been work-shopping an idea to align selfish (or amoral) game-theory with desired behavior, and it involves rewarding everyone directly for every vote (imagine if every $1 vote also sent $1 to your wallet, in 7 days, though voting power would probably be roughly halved), but vote trading will still require an algorithm to identify and regulate "abusers" and that algorithm will be programmed subjectively.

I don't have a solution to that yet or I'd have posted about the whole idea. I'm open to suggestions. Anyone?