I agree with everything you said here. Proof of Brain would require a system sort of like Minds.com has where every account is tied to a phone number that is anonymously turned into a hash and so is able to do 1 account = 1 vote.

Steem is not and never has been "proof of brain" but more proof of stake. Then, it turns around and alientates its stakers and its authors (which it already severally lacks).

Then comes free downvotes, which is a terribly stupid idea. Now every account has more power to do harm than it has to do good. In the past people had to ask themselves if it was worth it to them to take a hit in order to be a dick to someone, but no, now the dickslaps are free. We just made it so accounts can put more negativity into the environment than they can positivity, great plan...

The value of Steem, as I see it, is the immutable blogging space available to a person online. I think the more logical path for its design is to give SP a cap on all accounts, and that SP is not reclaimable. This means that for an account to have SP you are effectively burning that STEEM, or at least making something fungible into a non-fungible asset.

That way no single account could be 1000x the vote influence of another account, and owning STEEM would be more about owning decentralized "digital blog property" rather than some currency. The currency could be like potential parcels, very much similar to Mana/Land with the Decentraland project on Ethereum.

But its current roadmap makes no sense to me. Why do SMTs at all? From the standpoint of any reasonably funded project I would expect companies to fork Steem rather than make an SMT. Steem accounts are a barrier to entry and if a project wanted to create Steem-like token it makes much more sense for them to fork Steem, ninja mine like Steemit Inc. did, and use their god-like SP to generate the most amount of accounts per day just like Steemit Inc. does.

Steem is not a huge community (when counting active accounts) to tap into, so I see no incentive for serious, well-funded projects to buy a ton of STEEM to power up to make their SMT when they can fork Steem for so much less and have a much easier time onboarding users.