I'm biased of course, but personaly I still feel the solution I presented when reporting issue 2539 still seems more elegant than the voting mana cludge they came up with, and its concequences would have been even more friendly to non-abusers.
In short, the elegant solution would be to define STEEM equal to SP at 100% VS and to always preserve the sum of products of SP and VP in attomic transactions involving one or more accounts.
I understand there might be practical issues in implementing this and Voting Mana might be the only currently viable alternative, but again it remains a mainly defensive solution that punishes (be it less) those not set out to cheat the system.
An atomic Constant Sum Of Products (CSOP) solution would for example actually allow for reducing the delegation return period to zero instead of five days.
Don't get me wrong, the Voting Mana solution is still a huge improvement, sure, but the fact they chose it over a CSOP solution in my mind shows a duct-tape rather than an architectural approach to the fundamental issues.
I'dd love to hear your views on Voting Mana vs CSOP, and I'dd love to learn reasons why Voting Mana would in any way be better (other than the fact that the name of the solution is kinda cool).
I agree that full atomic would be best but I don't think there's any reason you couldn't do that in Voting Mana. I'm not sure what specifically they've implemented, but it seems like even if they've just gone halfway on that it sets up a framework to go to the full atomic solution fairly easily. Whereas getting there from the current system basically involves rebuilding everything.
It also provides a framework to eventually allow users a choice of how much VM to move within a delegation, which I don't think a basic implementation of full atomic would do.