Would not bother me to eliminate it, but that's kind of focusing on the mechanism.

The original guild stuff, which as you say was the same sort of mess, was done with bots. That was devs using their own accounts (though still filled entirely with ninja-mine stake). But when delegation came along that became a sort of loophole/excuse to weasel out of 'non-voting', not only on individual dev team accounts, but on the whole steemit account as well. Obviously this made matters worse, but the real problem to my point of view is the weaseling and the bad judgment. I don't think you can fix that with a protocol change, unfortunately.