I very much appreciate your considered and substantive reply. However, you have misapprehended my purpose. Money has no value intrinsically, at all. It only has value in relation to people. People are generally morally motivated, with ubiquitous tendencies to vices, I do admit.

Considering Steem only as a financial mechanism renders it devoid of value. It is the people that use Steem that give it value.

"...one of the few motivating factors causing people to buy a larger stake in Steem is to have a more powerful vote, and this gives them access to distribute more rewards from the pool than if they invest less."

Who cares if they self vote? Stake weighting enables substantial stakeholders to manipulate the rewards pool and take from it for themselves. This does not increase the distribution of Steem and does not put upwards pressure on the price of Steem. The reverse is true, because users that post and see @berniesanders self voting an insulting and inane comment for 30 Steem (Bernie, don't pretend you don't) while they get nothing, or only pennies for an hour or more work go away mad.

That decreases the market for Steem, and puts downwards pressure on the price.

I am not extemporizing morality. I am advocating sound business practices. Chasing away the market is not a sound business practice, and user retention to date reveals that Steem is not executing sound business practices in this regard. [@smooth and I discussed retention. He feels it is 7% or more, and I feel it is 5% or less. Either way, it sucks]

Build up the people using Steem, and you will build value into the price of Steem. HF21 does the opposite, and we are observing the results today. I elsewhere (replying to another comment of yourse) discuss how investment and profiteering differ. The former is a tide that floats all boats by increasing the value of Steem, while the latter only profits the profiteer, while decreasing the value of Steem, decreasing the ROI of the entire community as a result.

As to morality, I account the former good, and the latter evil, but no one cares what I think is right and wrong. The concept of fairness exists, and is not merely a human cultural construct. Octopi, crows, and dogs act way out of proportion when tidbits are not fed fairly to them and their peers. Hell, dogs will fight to the death over scraps - because it involves their social standing.

Steem is primarly a social media platform, and social media has proved to be the most profitable business model on Earth, so the FAANGs demonstrate. Steem, due to the encouragement of profiteering and focus on financial rewards, has failed to benefit from the socia media business model nominally, and here we are.

Build up the users, and you will increase the value of Steem. Put the horse before the cart and we'll get somewhere. It is people that have value, and money is worthless without people to value it.