Although I'm against @traf's actions I agree with his point. If he stops his self-voting ring and say a bunch of dolphins do the same thing while being mostly under the radar, @traf is basically loosing potential rewards for being a good guy. If @haejin talks to @ranchorelaxo and ask him to spread his votes around, @haejin looses potential rewards. The game theory incentives are actually set to rewards abuse. That is why I'm hell bent on protocol level changes despite being a minnow. Anything else is't going to do well enough. Alternative methods could even look like selective punishing.
Despite being fairly active on Github, the devs are not talking any proper actions regarding setting the incentives right. I'm not a programmer so I don't know how hard it would be to code a VP distribution limit. If there is at least a basic mockup we could put some pressure on witnesses to adopt it. The biggest problem is that the devs have enough funds (almost 20% of the supply) to mess with the witness list.
I still think that if we make enough reasonable noise to the point it seem like negative promotion, devs should take serious action at leas to protect the value of their own stake. We are currently having all sorts of flaggers from @steemcleaners to grumpy/madpuppy self upvoting hypocritical assholes ho are actually powering down at the moment. this shows a lack of community consensus. Devs could just call it free market anarchy and shrug it off. But if the community can agree on few basic principles, devs won't be able to ignore, especially with EOS around the corner.
Some people are just looking for cure all utopian solutions out of the box and poke holes at every solution that could make things at least a little better. Even though I think there can be perfect individuals I don't think here can ever be perfect systems. I'm currently in favor of a system which burn additional rewards based on voting distributions. I specifically prefer reward burning option because nobody can claim to be robinhood of the reward pool and make things political when rewards are not returned to the reward pool.
Burning STEEM/SBD brings the supply down and the price increases will be felt by every holder equally. If the funds were returned to the reward pool, it's just going to get into the hands of people who are already popular on steemit.
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you.
No big deal :-)