Profit is an inherent part of steemit. Users are supposed to upvote good content early in order to profit the most. That's what curation is about according to the white paper. I don't know why you want to end profit, that's the only thing that makes this site different.
I get your point about the value of steem, but I'm not sure investors wanting to profit from the site has a negative impact on the price. Users who want to profit have to stay powered up thus contributing to the price increase. For example I have not powered down a single cent in almost a year now.
The fact that the trending page is the same every day and that the retention rate is poor is the real concern to me and my 'proposal' addresses this.
The issue is not people wanting profit but the fact that users have to act against the platform's best interest to make the most money.
Incentives needs to be realigned so that people can profit while upvoting the things they like and contributing positively to the site.
I don't find profiting and profiteering to be the same thing, and I did try to point out that traditional capital gains are the victims of profiteering, as much as are new users.
In the white paper a discussion of financial manipulation points out that mining the rewards pool will harm the platform, and indeed, suggests that flagging/downvoting is the mechanism intended to prevent this.
As it happens, that didn't work as they said it was supposed to.
I hope you do feel that I am not desirous - at all - of insulting you, or anyone that acts to responsibly attend to financial matters. I'm not.
As you say, it is just a matter of properly aligning incentives. I just feel that as long as VP is weighted by SP, there is an incentive to seek to maximize ROI through voting strategies.
Profit from investments does not require stake weighted VP, as capital gains, when Steem's superb qualities as cryptocurrency bear fruit, will reward investors to higher degree than BTC, IMHO.