I also caution against heavy downvoting and reducing trending values drastically, people came to steem in their droves when trending posts were $1000 plus, with the hopium that they would get a fraction of that, right now with the highest cream of the crop being $150 let’s say

The way to get (some) higher values is with less promotion. Let the occasional exceptional post get voted highly by the stakeholders. The more that is spread out by a lot of people buying promotion every day and the more the total pool is drained by people buying promotion every day, the less an exceptional post will be able to earn even if it does get exceptional support.

All of the other stuff you mentioned about multisig wallets, theoretical proof-of-human models, etc. its all great but has nothing to do with voting on the reward pool. I'm all in favor of Steem not being a one-trick pony (which is why I'm totally in support of applications like Steem Monsters which don't rely on the reward pool at all, will be in favor of strong SPS proposals to work on multisig and such, etc.), and I would add to that promotion models other than using rewards (including some of the ones you mentioned), but as long as the reward pool does exist, and is a signature feature, we should also make the most of it, not abuse it for promotion.

The problem is actually vote apathy, you can put out all the great tools you like but if whales have busy work lives they won’t use them

Whales with busy lives can delegate to curators instead of vote-selling.

Or just not vote, which distributes influence to those with less busy lives. The less prevalent it is for everyone to monetize their votes, the less critical it becomes to monetize all of yours in order to keep up. Just being a passive investor relying on Steem price appreciation is a lot more viable. Which is a good thing because for most of the world of investors out there we want to attract, that's what they want, not needing to participate in some convoluted scheme involving vote selling.