I think its a great project and well worth the 15%, because it empowers people to at least be able to have a blog directed to a personal domain. I'm intending on moving a few people's websites over to it. But I have a suggestion...
What about a "delegation membership"? I've been thinking I might want to create something sort of like Kindle Unlimited subscription services but the membership "fee" is something like a 10 SP delegation requirement for reader accounts and 25 SP for author accounts.
Then a bot could be used to upvote authors when readers visit a page. This way, you're kind of paying authors for page views, and on top of that they could benefit from upvotes and the platform actually gains 25% of the value.
Of course, I realize this concept would not mesh well with the "not-yet-steemians" on-boarding strategy, which is a wonderful aspect of Engrave that benefits the health and growth of Steem.