I just think we tried it and its not working, that's essentially what I am saying. So, I am suggesting that we refocus toward an RC market incentive for investors and let the crowd employ the "wisdom of the crowd" approach for all content. It would be better than letting the ship sink in my opinion.
Lots of money in it too, think about how rich you are in RCs. Most people with even a small amount of SP have more resource credits than they need in a day. In the economic model I'm suggesting a community founder would have to rent your RCs from you in a dlease.io like site in order for this late arriver to Steem to be able to provide Steem access to his community members. Investors would love that idea, as they do with EOS. Its turning Steem integration into the shiny new thing that all community founders just got to have.
Oh, this community doesn't have Steem integrated? What a dump! I'm out...
Its the best of both worlds, because the stakers would become much like miners in this system, reaping the passive profits they want and providing a high SBD reward value due to all the money the whales have locked up in the network. In fact, EOS even markets this idea and tells people in its Coinbase course that owning just 1 EOS could in the future be enough to receive "space rent" from a dev team or entrepreneur.
That should be Steem's move toward communities, and it would even allow the users in those communities to feel the system is much more fair, because their votes would be relatively similar in value. In this version of Steem, RCs would be something the average user never even thinks about, because it would be like servers, just something the site administrators deal with. Do that and drop the inflation rate in half and you'll see the investors FOMO right on in...
Its not a wild idea, its exactly what EOS is doing right now and it is attractive to investors. Also, if you think carefully about the SMT concept, Steemit Inc.'s plan kind of is what I am suggesting, only, I am going as far as saying we should de-couple the reward pool from SP and not care about SMTS. The SMTs are nice and would be profitable to STEEM holders, but 90%+ of SMTS are going to be a joke and Steem Engine is already rocking that side of things. STEEM is where it is at, and its STEEM that communities will really want to earn because its universal currency.