As I understand, your main goal is to improve a quality of Steemit content including posts and comments. This is a great goal, but we have to be very careful with any feature that can increase a gap between "wealthy" and "poor" steemers, because the gap is already huge.

There are currently 334K user accounts on the whole steemit platform, while one single account (Trump) has 48.8M followers on Twitter.
If we really want to scale in the next few years, then we have to take care of the core values of decentralized platforms, which is censorship-resistance.

Your voice is worth something

Hiding or moving down "poor" people's comments with filters or algorithms is a form of censorship similar to how Twitter shadowbans users, which is exactly the reason why I'm thinking to move to steemit.

@junfadriquela said a very important thing:

in the end this will discourage people to post and reply their comments.

If we want to increase Steemit user base by 1000 times, then we have to develop a good onboarding process instead of dividing people into first and second class citizens.

Take me as an example. I always wanted to try steemit, but I didn't have a good article to start with. Finally I've wrote a medium article, which got viral and I got more than 30K views on medium even thought I didn't have many followers back then.

I thought that it will be a good try and one week later posted the same article on steemit. Obviously, there should be less views, because I didn't have any followers and some people have already seen this article on medium, but I expected a good exposure, because it was a high-quality content that got viral on both medium and reddit.

Do you know how many views I got on Steemit?

20 views.

As a result, I didn't post anything on Steemit, while medium got 6 more quality articles. The only reason I'm back here again is because of Twitter's censorship which went wild lately, but now I see that Steemit has also a lot of hidden censorship.

Now imagine yourself as a new author who discovered an awesome censorship-resistant platform that even pays directly to content creators without any ads. You happily started participating, but all your articles don't get views and all your comments either go down or don't get any reaction, because others use "reputation filter". Will you be incentivized enough to stay here more and research a platform? Probably, no.

Also I like your "whitelist" approach to increase quality of articles, but any kind of whitelist or blacklist is also a form of censorship which can be later exploited to promote e.g. certain political views.

You lose your privacy today while the government is good, but 6 years later fascists come to power and you go to jail based on something from your browser history today. (by Andreas M. Antonopoulos)

I understand that you want to see comments from the "elite", but please think carefully if this feature will actually help to achieve a wide adoption of Steemit platform and increase a quality of a content, or will this feature increase a power abuse and a gap between "rich" / "poor".

Don't forget that there will always be people who are richer than you.

Smart Comment Filter

As a bit better approach might be an AI algorithm which will check for patterns of pointless comments like "thanks, great article" and move them down.