When I referred to the spirit of how Hive is designed, I was referring to the deliberate inclusion of a worker pool, designed to fund projects - alongside an author pool, designed to fund authors (of content). Granted, software can be content and can be subjectively valued, thus upvoted from the author pool - but as you have pointed out, that approach is shaky and not really fit for purpose.. Which is why we have the worker proposal pool.

The original Steem white paper

Well that's fine, but this isn't Steem and almost every time I quote from the Steem whitepaper I get shot down by the authors of the Hive whitepaper who say 'This isn't Steem. Get over it'.

Yes, there is nothing that stops people upvoting software projects or infrastructure facilitation and yes that's how things were often done on Steem. However, I'm just pointing out that trying to correct a core failure of the blockchain to regulate HBD using a pool that isn't really meant to be for that use is always going to cause some controversy, especially among content creators.

It is well known in business/marketing psychology that people will care much more about losing something than they do about gaining something. This isn't an opinion of mine, but established scientific consensus based on numerous experiments. For this reason alone it is important to have clean lines in terms of the usage of reward pools. I am saying this from the perspective of personally knowing numerous medium sized web personalities (and many other smaller ones) who refuse to use Hive because of the perception they have of all of this stuff (which didn't come from me telling them btw - I actively encourage people to use Hive, including writing a full user guide for new users).

Ultimately, the big stakeholders will do what they want and will get the outcome as a result. I'm just offering my insights as a professional business systems engineer and digital marketer with a strong focus in psychology. Every time I have spoken up from this perspective, the Hive crowd has heckled and shut me down at key moments. In most of these cases time has proven me to be correct, e.g. the naming of Hive being controversial for numerous reasons and also causing an SEO failure due to the high competitiveness for all relevant keyphrases.. Differentiation is the magic of marketing.

What if a bunch of big whales buy into Hive and literally do nothing but massively upvote their own pet projects? They would dominate the reward pool and totally break POB in every way - but most especially in it's value as a marketing device.