I'm no whale but I frequently vote for burn posts because I can't find enough stuff I like enough to vote for. I also tend to avoid giving significant votes to people who are just powering down everything. It's hard to distribute hive better when there are so few to distribute it to. To be fair, content I like certainly isn't the only good content on hive but I'm not going around voting for stuff I don't pay attention to.

As far as the reward pool and rewarding content with it, I mean this is still the fundamental use case for hive. I don't think you can do away with it, at least not now. That isn't to say it can't be improved.

As far as ad revenue, I think that has been experimented with by a couple of front ends. My understanding is that It didn't make enough money to be worthwhile.

I think that conceptually the DHF is a good thing. However, I think there needs to be some algorithmic cap on the rate of spending. Plenty of others have written on ways to improve the DHF that sound promising.