I agree, this is getting slowly out of hand if we don't change the mechanic. I think it is better to go with your suggestion than waiting forever for the upvote until the post eventually gets out of range after seven days.

If we want to keep it a fair and equal system that doesn't care about the open source project at all (which certainly is discussable) then we need indeed more SP to cover the masses. On the other hand we could also try to manually improve the system. My 1UP project is a step in that direction but works outside of the @utopian-io bot. But maybe something like that would be a way in the right direction.