At the time most felt that this dramatically improved the fairness of the ecosystem, and since that change was put into place, we have seen a reduction in the income inequality in Steem. One problem with this change was that it reduced the incentive to consolidate one’s stake in a single account, which made it easier for bad actors to divide up their stake and hide their activities.
Was the goal "income equality"? I think income equality doesn't create an incentive to make increasingly better content. That said even if there was some level of income equality it would only make sense if the income were substantial enough and with the chance of a great post being discovered, going viral, and getting dramatic income.
Currently just about any post gets around $1-5 no matter how good it is, or what it's about. So now we have no ranking of content quality and no correlation of the size of the reward with the quality of the post.
Fairness might feel nice, but it's never going to be perfect equality. In this case trying to achieve fairness broke the economics for everyone.