Like @recursive said, it's not a good idea to mix witnesses with development. It didn't work very well in Bitshares 0.x. In Bitshares 2.0 witnesses were invented to separate block producers from other workers. The job of the witness is to witness all transactions that users make and record them into a block.
The governance model of Bitshares 2.0 is pretty good. Block producers (witnesses), blockchain parameter adjustment (committee members) and development (workers who are paid by the blockchain) are separated roles. I was a little bit disappointed when it wasn't copied to Steem.
I think this is the meat of the argument here:
And to illustrate the point:
We may be taking for granted that witnesses are honest and acting in integrity and ideology for the site, hence the title. Any witness NOT in accordance with this should be nixed. And I agree that mixing witnesses pay with development may be hazardous for this very reason.
HOWEVER, in @smooth's defense, many of the operations a witness manages in effort to protect the integrity of the site are also the qualities that make them witness-worthy. Meaning, we vote for witnesses because they are doing things like this. A lot of the "witness" functions are simply inseparable from the dev functions, at least at this early point in the game.
But in the end, I agree with @recursive. It may not be a good idea to mix witnesses with development. If witnesses are doing things to progress the platform full time, including donating their own money, perhaps they should be getting paid a lot more than $6,000 a month--but not as witnesses.
The problem is, who has spare time to be a volunteer witness with all of the projects they're running?
Sure, it's an honor. Bla bla bla. But when it comes down to it, if these witnesses are getting nothing for running a node, then that node should be a pretty simple thing to run. Or we're taking the WITNESS for granted. They have a lot of work to do, and they have influence with which to do it. This needs to be rewarded.
I don't particularly care what did or didn't work in Bitshares. what we have here is working here (at least this part of it is). That's what matters to me. As I suggested to @recursive, you should leave your Bitshares baggage there and approach Steem as its own platform with its own strengths and weaknesses, which it is.
This is absolutely incorrect as I noted in my comment. The job of witnesses certainly and inherently includes other functions and while it isn't necessarily inherent that it also include funding of initiatives, development, and personal contributions of time by high qualified individuals, that role is also working well in Steem.
While I do not have personal experience with Bitshares, I do know that Dan has written a few things about his experiences with Bitshares and how things that did not work well there informed his design for Steem. Apparently stakeholder voting on individual funding tasks did not work very well there given apathy, lack-of-expertise, and lack of coherent vision on the part of many stakeholders. By vesting a group of well-qualified, reliable, and trustworthy well-paid witnesses in Steem to personally perform or hire-out/delegate these functions in Steem, these and other well-recognized problems with direct democracy are avoided.