I've been saying for a long time that the average user will not downvote for the reasons you're mentioning.
The average investor?
The only hope for things like the EIP is at the whale level. If whales flag other whales stopping the large scale abuse, that could make a positive difference.
The most active stake on the platform by far is the orcas and dolphins, they are also the ones who will benefit the most from a price rise. The 30 odd whales here can sell now and do well enough, nearly everyone else needs the price of Steem to go up.
An algorithm that take a lot more variables into consideration.
And then we have google.
Something that maybe looks at page impressions, comments, upvotes, resteems, how quickly the upvotes came in, at what point in the posts life the votes came in, if known bots voted on the posts, etc. All to determine if something is ACTUALLY trending.
This isn't just about trending, it is about the entire ecosystem. This means that authors are only a part of the ecosystem, not the entirety. If this isn't a place where developers, investors and consumers want to be, the authors can still create but, they get nothing.
Yes, the average user, which won't be an investor. Is this an investment platform? It's a blogging platform that a user can choose to invest in, and will eventually hold a stake in if they continue to use it. The thing that gives it value, which would make it attractive to investors is USERS.
Just think about it like this, imagine all we had was Steemit Inc. in it's current state and NO other developments, but we had 5 million daily active users
or
We have SMT's, Communities, a super scalable solution, we fell on the perfect economics balance, but we have 50 Daily active users.
Which one is more valuable?
I'm counting Orca in "whale" in what I said previously, but anyway everyone wants the price to go up, the question is what's the most effective way to increase the price? I'm for the EIP, but I don't think it will improve the price. I'm hoping it just stops some abuse and improves the internal morale, and it would be great if distribution improved, but make no mistake, no one outside of Steem cares about this.
The bad thing about Google isn't the fact that they use algorithms. We aren't Google if we use algorithms, that's crazy. The bad thing about Google is they're collecting data from you, typically without your consent and selling it to advertisers and making huge sums of money from it without giving you anything. The bad thing about Google is that they are mining YOU for value. If we use an algorithm to get a more accurate picture of what is actually popular that just makes us functional, and capable of doing the thing we set out to do.