I am a fan of any additional game or mechanism that provides an incentive to power up (beyond the original reason, which is to be able to choose how to allocate your voting power).
I foresee SteemSports to be one of several 'games' that utilize the STEEM blockchain.
Other options include freemium RTS games. And instead, here, the game developer requires you to POWER UP in order to train more units, build faster, attack more, etc.
With proper thought into the design, this could bring in another demographic besides those interested in (sports) prediction markets.
I agree. This is why I am generally not in favor of trying to build these things into the blockchain on a one-off basis. Let people experiment, use scripts and bots, build subchains, etc. If there is something built into the blockchain it should be more general (such a scripting or smart contract function) so that it can be applied to many of these different concepts, just not the one that happens to be hot for a few months but may go the way of "Introduce Yourself" in time.