For me, an account's long-term commitment to Hive has become one of those considerations.

I totally agree with you on this one. And although, as you already mentioned, a high KE doesn't tell everything, it is a metric to keep an eye on.
And there are surely good reasons for people to have a higher KE and everyone can decide for themselves what they do with their earnings. But I also think that it's better for Hive to support people that have a long-term commitment (thus build their Hive stake). Even if you need to extract some Hive every now and then, there is no reason to have no staked Hive at all I think.

I recently changed my autovote settings and only added accounts that consistantly create interesting, high quality posts, don't have a high KE, and don't already receive high payouts by default on their posts.

If we want