Well this put a fresh set of eyes on all PoS things :)
Whales acting in not appropiate manner has been an issue on Hive beffore as well .... most here know bernie as the prime example. Although after some time more and more people turned against that and he just simply left.
I havent followed the discussion above in details, although from my experiance onealfa has always been a great supporter to the community and provided a lot of value with capital and a lot of his personal time.
About the governance models.
When the Hive HF happened I looked around for alternatievs, and I have seen the pos model and then a reputation model. The risks with the reputation model (curent democracy?) is that it can be faked, while stake can not. There was ideas about adding decentralized reputation model on top of the pos model, a type of hibrid. There are some papers about decentralized reputation models online. @blocktrades also mentioned that he is planing to build a peer-to-peer network for sharing and rating informations, on top of what diferent systems can be build.
Hive with its social aspect already has some form of unoficial reputation model.
Anyways great to see some brainstorming on the topic. I wouldnt rush into conclusions, dpos with social has its advantages and sometimes it just takes time for issues to be resolved. Also we can never move forward if we dont keep trying new things :)
P.S. For context here is the blocktrades post
https://hive.blog/hivemind/@blocktrades/a-peer-to-peer-network-for-sharing-and-rating-information
And here is another one, where I have touched your idea above about more tokens and competive market, with a concept like game within a game
https://hive.blog/hive-167922/@dalz/a-game-within-a-game-or-a-solution-for-the-first-comers-profit-the-most-problem