There may be other ways to redistribute steem wealth. Rather than repeating my arguments, I'd like to refer you to my thoughts on the topic if you haven't seen it already.
But it seems to be that the system is simply not set up with equality and distributed community power in mind. Or at least, the initial conditions heavily favor the 'steem wealthy' and they are having a hard time distributing power fairly.
Yes, good point. I think it may go to the root cause of the problem - the core design of the system itself