If Steemit genuinely wanted to target spammers only, there was a simpler way of doing it:

Set a baseline for the normal amount of comments a human can do in a week while still managing to eat, sleep, buy groceries and make love to their spouse (and maybe get a bit of other work done too). Say 100 posts/comments a week.

Then work out a weighted average of the last 4 weeks - when the spammer gets over the baseline (and your spammer would have done that in a day), then throttle to zero comments till the four week average comes back to 100 comments a week. Your chap wouldn't be able to post any more for three weeks and six days - a much more severe penalty than currently.

But what they've done instead is give whales massive resource even though most of those whales were not using steemit much at all. And given noobs 2 comments every five days - now increased to 20 comments every five days by the emergency patch.

This is a weird way of dealing with spam while at the same time claiming you want to "onboard" new users. Unless someone at steemit thought this was a brilliant way to force people from Venezuela and the like to buy steem and support the price.