The following reply is also copied from my comment on another post.

I think it is healthy and good to look into changing things like this, although we do have to be careful not to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" just because we are panicking that the price is going down.

One thing that I think a lot of people loose track of because we have been on a steady decline since the "July pump" is that the value of a vest is actually higher today than it was just before the pump. If you look at what happened as a temporary artificially/overly inflated hype, then it paints a lot different picture.

On 7/6, 1M VESTS = 197.368 STEEM = $45.987
On 7/20, 1 MV = 1M VESTS = 229.192 STEEM = $804.005
On 10/29, 1 MV = 1M VESTS = 410.581 STEEM = $65.412

(new for this post)

If you make the assumption that the top 19 witnesses are using 100% of their witness funds to line their own pockets, then I agree with you. The current 'pay' is quite high for the amount of work that the witnesses do.

The part that doesn't seem to be very well addressed though (which I know you are well aware of) is that witnesses are not using the money just for their own pay. The idea is that the witnesses are using a large portion of their pay to fund other projects that will benefit the platform. In a way, they are the board of directors that is deciding on where to allocate a large percentage of the STEEM budget.

I would argue that the system is not flawed, although the current choice of who some of the top 19 witnesses are may be. If a witness is using a large enough share of their funds to benefit the community - then the current system is actually not a problem.

I think what needs to be the focus instead of changing the formula is to have more scrutiny over who holds those positions, and if they are not making good decisions with what to do with their witness fund - vote them out and put in someone who will.

The last thing to add too though, is for an "average user" there may be more value being added behind the scenes that may not be very apparent to a lot of people. For example, the witness may be a hardcore blockchain programmer who is doing extensive code reviews of every hardfork - but they may never post or comment on Steemit.com, so other users might think the person is "useless".

If you think there are top 19 witnesses that are dragging the community down though, then it might be better to bring up those particular witnesses and open up a discussion about what value they are adding. Generally I am not a fan of "witch hunts", but I think this would at least be a better approach than casting the entire witness lot as witches.