My real world experience directly observing and interacting with the other witlessness, and being a close and careful (and at least as often as anyone else critical) observer of what is going on with the platform as a whole over the past six months trumps your bogus (and offensive to those who have and continue to pour their heart and soul, and wallets, into building out the Steem ecosystem supported by witness funding) theories about witness pay being 'embezzlement' or 'fake jobs'.
Secondly, the "powerful and versatile" funding mechanism that you claim exists in Steem is totally unsuitable for the task of funding development and initiatives. First of all the system is designed to have the properties of a lottery, already making it unsuitable for any sort of consistent funding less deliberately manipulated. Secondly, as curation guilds have developed with a mission to reward a larger amount of quality original content, the ability of posts to serve as a funding vehicle has been numerically reduced. It may have worked early-on when whales could easily vote large (even if deserved and justified) rewards for development posts, but that isn't the case any more. The only initiative currently able to be consistently funded in this manner is Curie, which self-votes its own daily posts with whale accounts to which it is given access for content curation purposes. Not only is this consuming too-large a portion of the reward pool to be even remotely scaleable or suitable for something not directly tied to rewarding content (if it is suitable in this case, which is questionable) but it is a practice that many (including the head of Curie itself) are not comfortable with and will probably not survive indefinitely even in this case.
It is clear from the erroneous statementa and baseless assumptions you keep making, along with a generally hostile and trollish tone (especially in the OP), that you have some sort of personal vendetta or agenda against the concept of well-paid witness slots and based apparently on that agenda you have made a number of statements and proposals which directly contradict the facts on the ground. Rather than continuing the blindly push the agenda, you should instead learn what is actually going on, which witnesses (hint: nearly all of them, if not all) are actively involved in supporting or directly working on important and expensive initiatives (since you are apparently unaware of at least the 14/19 where this is completely clear and unambiguous) and then, perhaps, your suggestions would appear better informed.
Finally I disagree with you entirely that there is no game theory supporting the trustworthiness high level of qualifications and good performance of witnesses. There absolutely is, but it requires that witnesses be well paid so they compete for the position and self-regulate to avoid being voted out. I've seen personally how the system is working well, the cream is indeed rising to the top, and poorly performing, less qualified, or less-available witnesses have been voted out or voluntarily dropped out. Your proposal, if adopted, would directly damage this mechanism, and in doing so directly damage the operating, governance, and development of the entire Steem platform. Only short-sighted investors would support this in order to keep a little extra money in their own wallets rather than spend it on something that so clearly to me adds tremendous value and safety to the network. You've been on the wrong side of this issue as you have relentlessly, almost blindly, pushed it for months without any consideration for what is or is not actually working.
Smooth, you are overreacting. Calm down, read again my post, and try to be objective. I'm not asking you to concur given your personal position in the matter, but don't jump the gun and start calling me names, all the while ignoring many of the points I took the time to develop. I'm not attacking anyone personally. I'm just pointing the finger at the absurdity of the witness pay system, that essentially consists in handing over half of the budget of the network to a small group of mutually appointed folks to share among themselves and use at their entire discretion, hope that they'll make good use of it, forego all control over the outcome and generally end up with little to no transparency about how the funds have been used, what has been done and who works on what. Even private companies and governments, for all their defaults, are more transparent and accountable than that. Is that the best that blockchain technology can achieve in terms of transparent and decentralized governance? You seem to think so. I beg to differ. Shouldn't that be open to debate?
I'm sorry recursive, but when you refer to "embezzlement and fictitious jobs" you are attacking people. You are the one who needs to be more objective about things.
Frankly I found your original post to be trolling (i.e. abuse) and considered flagging it. That was not based on the content or ideas at all; I upvoted @fyrstikken's post where he also proposed cutting witness pay despite not agreeing on that point. Steem has thus far largely been a platform where people are most often respectful and don't engage in the sort of hostile trolling or name calling that is common elsewhere on the internet, and which is present in your post. Please consider adopting a more respectful tone.
You again repeat your error that it is half the budget, when it is not (it is currently about 1/3). At least please study and understand the system first before proposing changes to it.