All of your ideas you present here are good ones, and old ones. In conversations with top witnesses, and Stinc, I have seen them handwaved away and brushed off. There's a reason for this, and it isn't given, so we have to make our best guess.

Here's some information which can inform your best guess as to why the system is the way it is today. Almost all the stake in Steem that exists was mined before Steemit, or any other front ends, were public. Almost all upvote bots buy delegations from those mined stakes, or are run by those accounts directly, which makes upvote bots and delegations the primary mechanism that produces ROI for whales. 35 of them control the vast majority of Steem extant.

Stinc and the top witnesses are dependent on that stake. Witness votes are stake-weighted, so the whales control the witnesses, and Stinc's market is those whales, who have all the Steem.

Transparent disclosure and sorting is a threat to whales profits, so how likely is it for Stinc and the top witnesses to make that happen?

It's not by mistake that the system is the way it is now.

Thanks!