I think this is the right direction in terms of governance. If done right, it will allow voting power to even out among the users and lead to better governance. I would think "account weight" will be a good first step then consider quadratic votes.

As @cardboard pointed out, this is somewhat anti-whale. However, if these rules are only applied to governance votes but not content votes, then the incentives for acquiring more HIVE will still be strong. I supposed there are a number of silent whales who are just trying to earn curation rewards without really wanting to be involved in governance.

In addition, I may be wrong on my understanding of witness voting, but AFAIK, we are allowed to vote up to 30 witnesses and each vote is a full one (i.e. with the entire stake). This was also an added factor on why it was so easy to vote in sockpuppet accounts as top witnesses in Steem. I thought a better approach will be to have your stake split among those that you have voted on (i.e. 50% of my stake to each witness if I voted for 2).