Thank you for explaining this to us. Unfortunately, stake -based voting has not worked. Making some tweaks will change and perhaps improve the dynamic slightly, but in the end it will reach the same point: people will adapt and find ways to honor their own self-interest. Most people do not want to curate or use their downvote power responsibly; they want to make money. Even the most idealistic and long term thinkers eventually realize that they can do a lot more of those things with their own money than they can by struggling to get the system to fit those ends.
Rather than guessing as to what might work in our one giant petri dish, it's probably better to acknowledge that Steem has become the reward layer for investors. Let SMTs create a second layer where much more experimentation can occur. I suspect the models that ultimately succeed will be those that do not try to combine investor incentives with content voting based upon stake, as the objectives tug in different directions.
I'm glad to see a few more people coming to this conclusion: the STEEM layer is the coin creation layer and then some social dapps will exist on top of this with different internal rules. One thing, however, is that those social dapps need to dip into the economic first layer in order to give their tokens some value. How they do so will be interesting to see.