Kinda sorry I missed this in the madness of harvest season, but I did, and here I am now. I think it's important to approach things on principle, and take actions solidly supported by sound principles. Regarding DV's I think a fundamental problem is that DV's have been considered the opposite of upvotes, and they're not. Content is a product, and upvoting it is comparable to purchasing a product, like a Toyota. The opposite of buying a Toyota is not buying it. The opposite of an upvote is no vote.
DV's then, are taxes in this commercial understanding of content. What manufacturer could survive if anyone could tax them to the limit of their stake? Business would be impossible IRL if Ford could tax Toyota 100% of their revenue on every sale forever. However, selling forgeries or stolen goods can be greatly discouraged by such punitive taxation, and that's why DV's are necessary on Hive, to discourage spam, scams, and plagiarism. There really aren't any other mechanisms Hive can employ to prevent those 'crimes' in our economy, so we really do need the ability to tax scammers and the like 100% of their take to eliminate financial reward for those 'crimes'.
I appreciate you giving the matter so much thought, and actually doing the work to take a stab at solving what is clearly a problem that has all but destroyed Hive as a social media platform - while social media rose to become the largest financial sector in the global economy at the very same time. Unrestricted taxation just completely disables the potential Hive has to enable creators to be paid directly by their consumers, and brilliantly enables that without spending from their personal funds. Limiting DV's to their essential purpose without enabling them to completely eliminate the commercial utility of Hive would enable Hive to rapidly become the go to mechanism for folks to publish forthrightly and create networks of folks aligned in their thoughts and policies on every matter of import to people, which is where we want Hive to go.
If you can come up with some kind of mechanism to delimit DV's to their essential purpose without enabling opinion flags to fly, you'll have the found the key to enabling Hive to conquer the world.
Thanks!