I am up-voting your post after a long time. This is a detailed review of how people are gaming it.
I think one good way of curating these kind of practices would be to make payout at the end of ten days. Allow up-votes till 7 days, but allow negative votes for the next 3 days to make sure that people don't misuse the system. A list of posts, comments that have huge payouts due to should be posted which the proxies(or general steemians) can take a look at and approve.
I am not sure how feasible this but definitely we should try something like this to make sure that the systems are not abused.
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