The plan isn't to take away earning from the top20. But to take 1% from what they earn and distribute it to to recruitment. Recruitment is a function that witnesses should be doing anyway, and some people are just better at recruiting than others.
This would provide an opportunity for witnesses to keep working on keeping the blockchain working as is and allow for an incentive for others to go out and recruit new talent. And we open the doors to more people, so instead of 20 witnesses recruiting, you have 1000+ people recruiting which would be far more effective.
Ah, I misread what you* said. I thought you were talking about the (roughly) 1% of annual network inflation going to witnesses.
*Using two accounts I guess?
No, we're two separate people. That's just my interpretation of dj's view.
DJ tends to take a reasonable approach, I think it's more reasonable to expect people to give up 1% of the rewards than 1% of inflation. Unless he's refering to 1% of inflation from witness rewards, but then you need like 2 different classes of steem which just makes this place even more complicated.