I believe there is a ton of distribution mechanism possible and Steem actual implementation is just an example. I would love to create a SMT that reward user based on their followers vests and not based on vote. If we can have this kind of flexibility in a decentralized way in Steem it would be magic. I like what Byteball been doing with declarative smart contract and oracles, see this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1617816.0