Limitations on cashout time are tied to the source of the reward. When the Hive blockchain rewards comment after 7 days, that time is connected to 7 days of a single step of power down. If there was longer cashout window, you could vote, power down, move the funds to some other account you control and vote again with the same stake. The connection gets its source from the fact that it is a stake that decides how much reward will be allocated. If we devised different system, some kind of "reputation" tied to the account - nontransferable of course (you bring more better content to the network, so your vote matters more), then we could decouple cashout time and power down. So far no one proposed a system that could not be easily gamed though. It is great that layer 2 solutions are being tested, because they can actually solve the problem, and even if they fail, there won't be any risk for Hive layer 1.
If the source of reward was outside the Hive, f.e. from the adverts played during viewing of the article multiplied by some factor of their "success rate" to weed out bots, then there is no problem with rewarding old content. In such case the reward is tied to content consumption and there is no rule that newer equals better (for some type of content there is, but there is also plenty of timeless content). Rewarding through tips is in that category.
There are ways to do it, people just have to experiment.
This is the power of the second layer. If a team tries something and it is a total failure, then we simply move on; no harm to Hive.
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