RE: overview of steem's broken 'RESTEEM' functionality, and how to improve it
As a bot that rewards good authors with resteems, I am interested in what you wrote, and the topic in general. Let me add some comments:
Problem 1 - cluttered blog.
I believe that this is how it should be. Resteeming something is a sacrifice from the resteemer as well as reward for the author. If we remove that, there will be way too many resteems (like - there will be bots that automatically resteem everything, even if it's 10 posts per second). The resteems are supposed to be a filtering layer for good content (if something got resteemed a lot, it's probably worth reading) but if there are too many of them, you are back to where you started - being surrounded by more posts than you can read the titles of.
Problem 2 - I fully agree! Giving context in Facebook style would probably be pretty cool.
Problem 3 - I disagree. Trusting the author is part of the price of resteeming. If we remove that part of the price, resteems will become too cheap.
There is another problem that you didn't mention. A post can only be resteemed once. Some people like some posts a lot and want to expose them every day, an D not just right now.
That's not possible at the moment. A post can be resteemed by a user only once.
I am not sure if that should change... It's a complicated issue.
Right now there are multiple prices for resteeming. The cluttered blog and trusting the author, but also the trust of your followers (if you resteem crappy content they might leave you), and others. Resteems are not free (and shouldn't be)
That's why services like @resteembot and others exist.