Of course, people will always try to maximize the system. But the entire point of this system is to make sure, that the top stake holders don't have as much influence on the top 20 witnesses.

Especially since witnesses 1-20 have the power to make all the decisions in relation to hard forks etc.
With >= 20 votes, pumpkin has an enormous influence in this. If we reduce this to <= 10, this helps a lot.

I'm not talking about saving the world, but I'm talking about decentralizing the election. And reducing the number of votes, certainly does that.

And I agree, this can be further reduced, to 5,3,1. But I think 10 is a good number. 10 allows people to select a number of witnesses which represent them well and they think represent Steem well while not giving anyone enough power to have such a huge influence in selecting ALL top 20 witnesses basically alone.