Those are not related directly. The lack on penetrability in the Witness system is not optimal in the current crypto industry sentiment and it would be of great benefit if more people could engage from that angle.

Now to the second part. Hive should have been the place to birth Community Nodes. That would have been a real priority. Funny enough, now you could copy paste from X, but there's no motion. I'm fairly certain that gaming the system is part of everyones mind at some point. We're all battle hardened by the Crypto Sphere after all. The fact that there's still no proper advancement means, important people just don't want to.

This brings me back to an idea that I've been flirting with for some time. The reward split on votes is 50/50, we don't want to make it lucrative to game the system, ok cool. And we don't want to give people the ability to completely annihilate each other or to spook everyone away from engaging.

That would mean, the logical setup is:
Downvotes,...

• ...push rewards back into the reward pool
• ...can only deny 50% of the rewards, the author part
• ...spend upvote mana obviously stays fully spend

I fail to see why that's not been the default. Beyond that, up- and downvoting tools should have been democratized for anyone to use with their stake.