You've done some considerable thinking about this, and I appreciate it. However, you simply ignore prior discussions of these specific proposals we have undertaken, and circular thinking isn't going to get you anywhere. Using IP's as some sort of oracle to sort individual users is trivially defeated, for example. Anonymous voting is a fraud superhighway. Changing the labels on the buttons is irrelevant. If I wanted to use Reddit, I'd be on Reddit.

You briefly touched on an actual issue that can be resolved to benefit Steem, and that is

"...the rewards pool is to incentivize content creation and curation."

You note that Steem used in this way does not encourage profiteering, but that profiteering is a primary motivation of some people. You seem to imply it's all people, but that's silly. For these people rewarding content is a waste of Steem, when they can reward themselves instead. Who cares about social networking except as a means of generating income anyway?

"Why...give it away to people who are not yourself."

This reduces society to no more than the mechanism that fills your wallet. Clearly there are many people that approach Steem that way, and some that have put in the time and effort to generate income from other social media platforms. Of course we see this IRL too. All the good deals are made at parties. Lots of people say a lot of things, insincerely, to make money, and a zillion angles on how to make money from people looking at you have eventuated, some beneficial to society, but most an anchor around our necks.

You'd think that if these profiteers used their tricks they'd suck the money out of the system, and it would become useless to folks that wanted to use it for it's socially appropriate purpose - curating content, forming communities to support ideas and policies, and making the leap to self-governance by using the format of post, engagement, and the built in funding mechanism. They'd just leave, and then the token would be increasingly worth less, because the market that makes it worthwhile was shrinking.

Oh, wait. That's exactly what's happening.

You do give money to folks that aren't you every day. Free Speech is no different than any other valuable thing as a reason to spend your money. I bet a lot of your money is spent on it IRL already. So curating content is a reasonable expenditure of funds, and Steem is a particularly useful mechanism to promote speech and communities far more relevant to your interests personally than most media on offer.

No one foregoes income to vote on those other platforms and they vote. Making posts unsuitable for financial manipulation by reducing their value below the cost of that manipulation means that there is no income potential to forego, and then curation would no longer be so monetized that it was prevented from actually pertaining to content preferences.

Might as well fix trending while we're at it. Bring the wisdom of the crowd back.

As long as stake weighting enables profiteers to extract the vast majority of rewards, user retention will remain dismal. I have proposed the Huey Long algorithm to prevent financial manipulation by profiteers, which would leave only that same incentive people have to upvote on Reddit, or other social media platforms, those socially beneficial purposes aforementioned, but won't detail it here because I have discussed it with you previously.

I recall also discussing IP's, and button labeling with you before too. Seems discussion of these matters isn't going to impact your understanding, since you're posting the same proposals here. I'm not really sure what you think these proposals would achieve, since profiteering seems to be the only approach to Steem you consider rational. Flagging rewards back into the pool is a good strategy for profiteering whales, so doesn't make any sense to oppose given that stance on profieering.

The only way to imbue Steem with value is to grow a market for it. The original intention of Steem was to encourage the growth of that market. Profiteering discourages the growth of that market, so needs to be curtailed in order to grow the market and raise the price of Steem, thus profiting ninjaminer and investor alike, by profiting creators. Ninjaminers are the ones preventing that from happening.

Steem languishes as a result. It is the social media that creates the value for the token. Encourage society with the token, and the token will gain value. Keeping that token out of the hands of creators prevents it from gaining value. The original vision outlined in the Blue Paper needs to be achieved for Steem to become the valuable money it was intended to be. Whether the outline was blind sided, or blind siding, doesn't matter, because allowing profiteering to replace the purpose of the token has destroyed the trait of the token that allows to gain value.

Other than limiting per post rewards, what mechanism can discourage profiteering? Note that I am not looking to change human nature, but to effect a rewards mechanism that doesn't financially reward profiteering, and does reward content creation and social engagement financially. Carrots and sticks are what enable civilization, after all, and that is what gives any money it's value.