An alternative that might make more sense in the nearer term would be to have some proposals that pay a big chunk of SBDs to a handful of trusted community members who could then use those funds as grants for worthwhile projects.

They could even put funds into multisig accounts, which could then be directed by two or three trusted people. Give proposals to multisig accounts that are controlled by teams of people, and then let them compete to deliver useful projects?

Philosophically, it might also be worth considering whether the "development" people value happening on other chains might be a soft equivalent to the "proof of work" system: people are confident enough in the value of chain X that they are willing to put real developer person-hours into it.

This is an interesting point. A way to harness this effect might be to pay proposals retroactively, after the deliverable has already been created. For example, @rexthetech could have submitted a proposal to be reimbursed for his multisig tool after he completed it.

Personally I think the system wasn't well-designed, and suffers from some of the same governance issues as the chain as a whole. To be generous, the main driver of the original design had been the top witness and may not have realized that the witness-voting had issues that were repeated with the SPS.

Yeah, I think there's something to this. IIRC, this paper argued that there should be somewhere around 4 witness votes per account (VPA) on a DPOS chain with 17 consensus nodes in order to prevent centralized takeover. So, I guess maybe a similar dynamic is in play with the SPS. The ability to vote on an unlimited number of proposals might give too much of an advantage to large accounts.