Stake-based voting is an absolutely must unless you want KYC. There is no question about it. Without KYC implemented at chain level, there is little to stop those with the money from creating hundreds of thousands or millions of accounts to vote under one-vote-per-one-account.

And more participation at this stage is exactly what solves the problem. Coordinating everyone's witness votes was exactly what was crucial in wresting control back from Justin Sun on Steem. If the rest of the community just passively waits for the whales to get things done what we get is more consolidation. At this time, the mathematical reality is that middle-tier users collectively are capable of introducing enough competition over access to a top 20 witness position to keep things from going completely stale.

We have listened to years of screaming how Steemit, Inc was holding us back. I'm still withholding judgement as to how this thing will work but I'm taking the possibility into account that things won't work any better than when Steemit, Inc was responsible for core development. No amount of screaming obscenities or flagging will do any good if critical stuff does not get shipped by the DAO. Interesting times.