Yes, it is arbitrary, and not a fixed number. And yes, a lot of users could improve.
Forming closed groups is not how you build a big community. If we want steem to grow, it's important that a lot of people look outside of their group. Especially the ones with a bigger stake - if they group up with other big stakes, there won't be a community except these groups.
And past experience shows that very clearly. We had thousands of people join over time, who left again because they didn't feel like valued members of the community, because of group behaviour. Retention is the number one problem, and the only way to improve that is to break the circles.
I'm absolutely aware that it's not a realistic expectation that everyone scouts the blockchain all time. I don't do that myself. That's why I started a curation project that makes it easy and still profitable to distribute to the wide userbase for myself and every other stakeholder. They can still keep some for supporting their group directly. But as someone said earlier today, at some size you have to stop being a boat and become the tide, or there won't be enough water for all the boats.
People are always welcome to buy more steem, power it up, and form their own "groups". In fact one could argue that kind of activity would be more beneficial for prices than arbitrarily voting as many authors as possible, like the 2k you mentioned in the post.
One thing that was interesting was that you didn't mention anything about the quality of the posts of those users you call 'abusers' (again whatever that means in an open system without rules), yet later you talk about upvoting quality content. Are we about quality or are we about spreading the wealth? There seems to be some contradiction there. Your arguments lean more towards the latter, and if that is the case then yes we should just be a true POS blockchain, where stake determines reward.
That's short sighted. Buying is beneficial for the price on the short term. As soon as they feel like their group is big enough, that stops and turns. We need growth and a big active userbase, using steem for more than handing out rewards, to become sustainable.
The whitepaper gives guidelines, and colluding groups are mentioned as one of the main forms of abuse. The quality of their posts is irrelevant as long as it is evaluated by their group only and not all of the community. This is how the concept of proof of brain works.
It is about both rewarding quality content and distributing wealth, and there has to be a balance. Downvotes are the tool we have to move some from the latter to the former. The goal is not to get to "only quality", as it shouldn't be "only distribution" either.
The creators we upvote are not randomly chosen, but by a big group of curators. The downvotes similarly are decided on by delegators using their stake to use the function of downvotes as it was intended. Standards on quality and what is overrated obviously differ for everyone, and that's good because it makes the community varied.
After last SteemFest I actually suggested to give stakeholders the possibility to opt out of the reward pool to receive their share of the rewards without having to find ways to farm on posts. I would be fine with that, and still support the content creators with most of my stake.
That proposal didn't get a lot of traction, the general consensus was to try improving Proof of Brain. The EIP is all about that, and all I do is participate in the way the system is set up.
Fair enough. Though I would argue that the term "general consensus" is a misnomer as it really is just a few of the more influential whales and witnesses that decide most of the direction on here. The community was mostly opposed to the EIP when it was proposed, it was extremely lopsided as I recall, though it was pushed through anyways. Consensus is mostly a fantasy on here, stake weighted rules in more ways than one.
Stake weighted consensus is consensus nevertheless. In a publicly traded company it's the norm that bigger stakeholders have a bigger vote, steem is nothing else than that. The idea that the bigger stakeholders have the most to lose when the company/project performs badly isn't silly.
Most people, especially those who don't have much to lose, are for the things that benefit them personally, and against what doesn't. Propose a reverted curve and I bet you'd get a lot of minnows telling you how much they like it, although the doors that would open for abuse would be huge.
Many people who used bid bots defend them, circle jerks complain about the downvotes hurting steem as a whole - not many people are able or willing to see the bigger picture. Having a stake helps with that, although it's no guarantee.