Maybe we'll have a dapp someday to help rate everyone in term of how shady their upvote habits are.
Give it a few years. An Oracle / Manual curation token type deal will appear. Years of voting habits will be assessed, and the folks that never gave posting authority to any voting services, or never showed any consistent vote times, will be part of a manual curation group. There wont be many people there, but those that are there will look pretty cool :)
I think this post relates to your final point: https://steemit.com/steemit/@tarazkp/helsing-governance-ideas-good-bad-whales-needed