I agree with this assessment entirely. Realistically there should be an infinite number of votes per user. Although this does need to be reduced in practice, 30 might be way to small. I agree that on the order of several hundred should be the target.

DPOS comes with many tradeoffs against other consensus protocols.

I would really like to see an implementation of steem on another blockchain or using another consensus mechanism. No premine would have been nice too.