I fully agree with the experiment (is it still ongoing, or finished by now?) to see what happens with the reward distribution, and activity levels when the high power individuals / members are not voting anymore. Days into the experiment I'm sad so many people being against it, and some even stopped blogging or even stopped being a witness.
I'm looking forward to results and interpretations of it. Do you plan to create this soon? Or maybe you already done that?
I do agree we need to discuss further how to create a community with rules (technical/procedural) allowing the community to grow and with that the underlying currency to grow. What puzzles me is the size of the reward pool. According to @frystikken this is today around 7k$ (well by now maybe 10k-15k$ with the increase of Steem value last couple of days). If we would have 20k posts per day, or even 100k posts per day, then the average reward per post is far below 1$. Will rewarding than still be something that will work? That can be used as THE argument for people to create blogs over here instead of somewhere else?
The "experiment" is going on. I didn't analyze the data produced, perhaps some other people will do it before me.
If we have much more posts per day, we expect that price of STEEM token will be higher, so we'll have bigger average reward size.
Steem value. Only time will tell. I think Steem requires more than 'just' the blogging service as we have it. Tools for Brands needs to be created so that they will pay for using Steemit as a channel for interaction with their fans and the wider community. This will increase the value of Steem. The blogging service as we have it today will not add a lot more value to Steem as a currency. At least that is how I look at it right now; As someone who is very new to all of this virtual currencies and all; So my opinion and ideas may change when understanding all of this in more depth.