This sounds vaguely familiar :)
"We need to appeal to Joe the Plumber and not just Linda the Linux admin."

Great minds. If you don't know what I'm talking about, even BETTER, and I'll show you sometime! :D

As for the actual post, good looking out man. I'm concerned without as much understanding as you, just based on the premise that these don't smell like root cause solutions, they smell like treating symptoms with hastily constructed bandaids. As I see so much of happening with the steem tech since I discovered it and started paying attention. All my software career spidey senses are tingling here daily.