I think you make great arguments and I agree with you. And by the way, I wrote a post on SteemPower loans as well! :)
https://steemit.com/steemit/@trevorlyman/p2p-steem-power-loans
One comment though, if the system puts motivations in place that allow people to game the system I think the problem is more with the system than those that are abusing it. I view the abusers more like "hackers". They are revealing weaknesses in the system, and so also opportunities to improve it.
Trevor, to this point I have been studying cryptocurrency aspect of steem and not really what the actual platform is about. I thought it was just sort of a replacement for facebook, twitter, etc... Is it really only for bloggers? Is that what I am hearing here?