I believe that implementation of a less-superlinear reward curve is perfectly in line with the goal of increasing user participation, engagement, and retention. And better, it's a simpler change which does not limit the scope of Steem.

Yes the one thing that was most promising about HF17 hands down, as the community has shown with the voting experiment conducted by @clayop Voting Test

I applaud how you concluded with that, it's imperative that we engage and retain users and the experiment ran by @abit and @smooth actually succeed in that aspect, but of course the way it ran caused both confusion and upset a bunch of people and therefore could only do so much for user retention.