Having the long term investment currency formerly called vests now called SteemPower is pretty integral to the design though. And though it makes things more complicated the draw of Steem Dollars is the unit makes sense to an everyday user. If the payout was measured in steem you'd lose a lot of comprehension from people not well versed in cryptocurrency.
The Steem Dollar also has the interesting feature of paid interest over time and can potentially be used as a general USD pegged currency not completely tied to Steemit. It seems to me that the Steem guys are keeping their options open in that regard because it's a concept with some potential.
I agree that there are still many complications in teaching someone that doesn't comprehend the metric system until now.
I think the issue is more how it is presented to the user. The current Steem/Steem Power using the same currency units is a vast, huge, enormous improvement over the previous VESTS with its own units, but it is possibly still too confusing. I'm not really sure from reading the post if he is responding to the white paper or the current power-up/power-down UI on the web site.
There are all sorts of low-level details that are never directly presented to the user in terms of the details of the voting algorithms and such, and that is all fine. I don't think anyone disputes the idea that having a locked unit is needed, but the question is more how to present that and present it in the least complicated way that still functions.
how about trying to teach people the basic withdrawal steps first so that they are rest assured they're "money" is easily accessible?. Also, I think they'll be more inclined to worry less and invest long term.
I would call SteemPower "Influence"