@smooth In a sense, you're correct, only invested users should have meaningful weight on content curation; however, keep in mind that the stake now may not accurately reflect user investment. In the long run, the rewards system is intended to align SP distribution with reputation (people who provide real value in the system outweigh trolls), but that self-balancing effect might be too slow. Eventually the number and quality of whales will be quite large, and they'll have sufficient bandwidth to upvote all kinds of good content and downvote the crap, but right now we're still working on attaining that level of decentralization in the content curation.
It appears that the decentralized social media competition is now on, and if Steem is going to survive, it needs to keep up. Part of that might be figuring out how to grow valuable users' relative SP faster. One obvious way to do this is to decrease the degree of dilution mitigation SP holders enjoy, which will require SP holders to create comparatively more value to maintain their slice of the pie, and instead allow the high-value minnows to grow their relative stake faster. I'm not saying this is the solution -- I haven't put enough thought into it -- it's just an idea off the top of my head.
@stellabelle is pointing out real problems. Let's not let our excitement about Steem lull us into complacency; we need to fully understand these problems, and act to resolve them at their roots.
Designing a content publication platform with an economically-driven curation model is still an open problem. Will the current algorithms move the SP distribution in a better direction? I don't know what an ideal distribution would look like, but certainly some distributions are better than others, and we would do well to figure out what makes for a better or worse distribution, and ensure we're moving in the right direction. Even if the current algorithms are moving in the right direction, are they moving fast enough? If someone else can create a competing platform that moves in the right direction faster, they should rightly eclipse Steem, as that would be a superior solution.
I like Steem, though, so let's try and beat 'em to it.
@modprobe, my comment was narrower than that. I'm not suggesting that there can't be improvements, only that raw vote count is meaningless and has been consistently and rampantly abused on every other such platform, and those are platforms that don't even award money. With direct monetary incentives the abuse would be even greater.
So I agree with the broader issues you mention being considered and explored, I just disagree with statements made on the basis of "how many votes".