IMO, a compromise solution might be to distribute the proceeds from the reverse auction to post 30 min voters (as opposed to authors).
That's actually not a bad idea, if it can be relatively easy to implement. There were three attempts and three failures on incorporating an editor on Steemit. :)
IMO, the steem team is very good at making changes to the blockchain (where this would happen). Just not great getting things done on the UI.