I've discovered that new Steemers face a tradeoff between the distribution benefit of existing networks and the monetary rewards benefit of Steemit.
When someone like Neil Strauss posts on Steemit and shares it with his 118K Twitter followers for the first time, that is much more valuable to the network than when I join Steemit and share it with my Twitter followers. The incremental value of that post should be reflected at the protocol level, because as this thing grows the community is inevitabilty going to miss high-value content. When high-value influencers balance the tradeoff between distribution and monetary incentives, I believe most will simply drop off unless this is reflected at the protocol level.
Implementation could be something like...
I agree with you, but I believe the way to achieve this is different than what you suggested and which will not be in tension with:
This is better for growth but worse for long-term ecosystem health imo.
In short, relevance for users of Steem should not suffer for the costs and benefits of onboarding and maintaining professional and highly influential bloggers. The key question is how to design such a protocol. As I alluded, I have a design in mind, but I am keeping it secret for the time being.