I'm not sure it would be responsible for anyone to pass along their vote or allow anyone to act as a proxy. This gives some users imbalanced voting power and leaves minnows at a disadvantage.
Who is more likely to get passed a proxy vote? Large accounts.
This may allow a single user with a bunch of followers to unfairly influence important decisions that would be better represented with one vote, one account.
If large accounts or personalities have a certain position on a particular issue they should have to campaign and blog their sentiment to the community and have them cast their vote accordingly, not cast hundreds if not thousands of votes for others. There are too many ways to exploit this kind of feature.
That's why you have to trust your proxy.
There's less than 10% of active users voting for witnesses. Sometimes they don't even hava an idea what the witnesses are and why would that matter.
Most users never ever talked with a witness and have no idea what they are doing, still, they are very important for reliability and security of the platform. Without knowledge about technical details or how certain actions affects the platform it's hard to make a decision. So if you know someone of trust that keep an eye on a witnesses and would adjust votes accordingly, then it's just an indirect election.
Again, I understand your thoughts and feelings. However, if someone doesn't take the due diligence to learn about what he or she may be participating in including technical aspects of the platform, then they cannot responsibly delegate their vote to someone they assume has done their diligence. If we follow your reasons, the same reasons you give to motivate someone to pass a vote along are the same things that make the act of vote delegation not only dangerous but blatantly irresponsible as well. If a user doesn't know the technical side of steem, how can they make an informed decision? They can't understand your technical view, right?
As with real elections, low information voters are free to cast a vote, but they are not free to pass their vote to another voter if they aren't up to the task. In US elections fewer votes are cast in general elections than the total possible voting pool. But we haven't made the choice to allow non participants to allow someone else to cast a vote on their behalf. I'm certain there are many logical reasons why.
I do understand what you are saying to justify this ability. I didn't wish to be adverse to the proposal for adversity's sake. Someone a ton smarter than myself could demonstrate countless ways this type of delegation could be abused. I think if you would like to convince others that this is viable, you need to explain how abuse will be taken out of the equation. If you cannot, this should be a non starter and devs should move quickly to disable the feature.
Simply: possible abuse of power is on both sides of the equation.
It doesn't matter if you trust user X when it comes to witness votes decisions.
Or if you trust user Y about being a good witness.
If you trust X as a proxy and X votes for Y, it is exactly the same as if you would trust Y as a witness. If there is some malicious agenda at X or Y, then issue is the same: you chose to trust wrong people.
Not to mention that you have complete control on your decision and that can be changed in 3 seconds.
Witness is not my point at all, I think you understand that. A witness, if voted to be a witness by each account, has earned the right to be witness. If one person could cast 1000 votes for those who otherwise don't care to vote, that is an imbalance that should not be readily welcomed.