what happens when an overwhelming majority of top stakeholders opt for the Lock-up Mode?

This is the case at present but it's into the bots - earning them less/equal than this proposal, but also distorting trending and giving us a headache for the past year or so.

You have to look at which large accounts are actually manually curating, not on a select few, but platform wide to what they see should be in the shop window. There are barely any whales doing this, and not so many orcas. The stake is either going round in a circle, or it is out to bots.

Those who care/wish to have a voice keep some stake for voting or delegating - not even freedom is all out of bots, nor is haejin all out of self-vote (dele to dstors recently).

$1 posts is too low - there is no point me locking stake and I can give an 80 cent vote. And looking at the current top 11 voters for this post:

I would guess 3 of these accounts might lock stake, and the 3 i'm looking at are not frequent voters of taraz's content. The rest have delegated stake, 'love steem', or are content creators who thrive from reciprocal votes from interested parties.