Many people don’t understand potential payouts or what true censorship is. We have education work to do there.

This! 🙌

Part of me still thinks the problems here are psychological. If huge whales are trying to extract too much value instead of using the value they already have to protect and grow the collaborative commons we have here, then they essentially destroy their own provisions.

Good summary of the individualist responsibility / culture point of view. I think point of view contrasts with the view which places overarching systematic incentives at the core of positive behavior problems.

I lean to the latter. The incentives work whether or not you're aware of them or even factor them into your decisions because the create the outcomes and everyone responds to outcomes. This is where @tcpolymath gets it wrong too. Individual people "feel" the systematic incentives even if they are not aware of it. Rewards subtly (and not so subtly) affect what people determine is cogent to do.

I also think your analysis is wrong here:

If, instead, they thought in terms of rational, long term value creation (instead of irrational, short-term value extraction), we might all benefit more.

It is not necessarily irrational to extract value in the short term, especially when you factor in the unknowable future, difficulty in coordinating among large stakeholders (ref prisoners dilemma), and so on. Changing the rewards structure is I think a good attempt to offset the unknowns and paranoia which is akin to FOMO.