If you take away the ability for abusive self-voting to give significant rewards without a pile-on of other voters, then you are also taking away the "regular users" ability to influence rewards. Any shift away from linear rewards is a shift back towards only the major stake holders having influence/power.

I totally agree with this and this below. Thank you for this post Tim. I really appreciate it!

Every Steemian chooses for themselves how they want to use their stake. For those people who want to chose to use theirs purely for the purpose of increasing their own personal rewards (or those of their friends, sock-puppets, etc.) they need to ask themselves if this is their vision of how the platform is going to scale to the masses.