You are right I think that would be the ideal situation if everyone could delegate their voting power and up until now the only real way to do it is with groups like Curie. I do like the idea of electing curators like witnesses though and I suppose if we can get delegated voting working for everyone that would be the situation.
My reference to the Steemit team was in case they were hesitating or wanting to test the system out on a small scale before rolling it out to everyone. It could be a pilot run to iron out any issues or problems.
I do not agree it is ideal for everyone to delegate their voting. A large population of independent, individually-invested, and diverse users with different interests and perspectives is a far healthier way to allocate voting power than recentralizing it under a relatively few designated (and presumably less- or un-invested) curators.
For those who choose to delegate their voting, that can probably add value over not voting at all, but forcing that model on everyone is not a good idea.
In fact if it were feasible to get rid of elected witnesses and have every stakeholder sign blocks instead of a relatively centralized small group, without giving up the specific operational and governance advantages that it brings, I'd be in favor of doing so. I see no such compelling reason to centralize curation with this form of system-wide delegation.
I hadn't considered that.
I think it would be a great temptation to delegate voting to someone else because it is a lot of work for not much reward (or so it seems).
A global option would likely cause more centralisation as you say due to the temptation to pass off your voting power to someone else. Thank you for pointing it out.
One way that could potentially mitigate this would be to only allow a certain percentage of voting power to be delegated.
Then you run in to the potential issue that due to the way the system works if people only pass of a percentage and then don't bother voting it makes no difference - since the rewards would adjust to the amount of voting being carried out.
This would make it a pointless change.
I think I see more and more the dilemma of running an endeavour like Steemit.
Every time you try to fix one thing you and up breaking something else.
Luckily we have a lot people in the community to scrutinise things in advance.
I agree that if DV were to be implemented some kind of measures would need to be taken to reduce the centralisation.
The problem is we do also currently have a degree of centralisation due to the large amounts of SP held by a few individuals. It would be a matter of striking the right balance and making a positive change.
Excellent points as always.