I agree with these points. I do believe going from rshares^2 to linear is a drastic change. And conflating the results with another related change to vote power is a poor idea of a bundled feature change.
One of the intended effects of lessening the curve was to give comments a better chance of rewards. But if people are voting with 2% of their VP with every full-power vote, will people vote for comments then? The argument is that people can adjust their voting power, but more cognitive load is not something that should be intentionally introduced to voting decisions. It's bad enough already.
The rationale for going to strictly linear is that there would be too much complexity or too much of a node performance hit with other curves. To their credit, some Steemit developers did sit down and put a good deal of effort into coming up with some Steem-friendly reward curves. But they were scrapped for one reason or another. I believe @arhag claimed that it would be possible to lessen the curve without flattening it, while still sticking to computationally cheap math, but I don't remember more details than that.
With all that said, it's basically too late now for debate, unless witnesses were to not upgrade like with HF17. But that is unlikely to happen from my point of view. The best that can be hoped for is that the people leading the development of Steem and Steemit learn from errors. It comes slower to some more than others.
@pfunk great reply here mate seems like you said comments don't get many up votes . Keep on steeming on
Yup the linear thing is almost irrelevant, the 400% increase of potential power per vote is somewhat drastic, but very exciting :)
I wouldn't care if they increased it from 0.5% to 100% either lol. As long as they would give everyone the slider that is...
I think it's done for the little people. Users with > 500 SP will have the slider for more accurate curation. There are so many more little people (over 95% of the user base probably) that will all have 4 times as much power because they have no slider. We'll see how it goes, it can't be that problematic. More problematic than the current implementation seems impossible to me. It's horrific right now.