The thing is most other crypto doesn’t have long lockups like Steem, there are other ways to protect your funds like split your stake over multiple accounts, a 4 week vesting period is still more protection than most chains offer, but I think we shouldn’t force long lockups on users and become a nanny state, offer a lower lockup period, long enough to deter exchanges from voting, ie 4 weeks is a good deterrent still, and then allow power users to lockup longer dynamically should they wish. Diff incentives for diff lengths of staking becomes complex and leads to more bugs that can occur, steem should be as simple as possible, SMT’s can be more variable and complex.

Another reason to have a lower lockup is to allow SMT’s to be more flexible to cater for more use cases, since SMT’s can’t have a shorter vesting period than the main token, makes sense to reduce the period on the main token to allow more SMT vesting options.

If exchange voting is s risk there are other ways to deal with that, make it an onchain policy that exchanges can’t vote and use an oracle that has a list of known exchange accounts that are excluded from consensus voting.

Ah and i just realised you were responding to the quick power down burn, I am also no longer in favour of that due to security risk of hacker insta-stealing your funds via the insta withdrawl burn method.