@valued-customer you are not wrong, I'll use a solution (of sorts) to illustrate the larger problem.
Lets say we restrict any top 20 witness so it gets maxed out at 10-25% of total stake votes, and the more votes a witness has from the same account, the faster the steempower vote decays, or some counter intuitive algorithm that encourages periodic review of votes and diminishes the repeat big votes. eg. 1 SP that is a new vote has 100x more powerful (capped at 10 - 25% of stake) than 1 million SP that has voted the same account 90% of the time last 1-2 years.
Unfortunately dpos is still an oligarchy in some sorts even with 1 SP= 1Vote (vs 1 SP = 30xVote), hard to change unless stake holders becomes radical long term altruistic thinkers (aka not humans yielding power) .... E.g try telling OPEC (shieks) and Russia (putin) to start mass investing 90% of their resources into clean tech and deleverage from oil pollution for it's people's and planets sake...... it's just too much inertia (greed) to overturned.
best to hf Steem (if it's to survive) reboot a new block chain into some sort of Egalitarian-Weighted-DPOS blockchain, how that would work would probably need some gifted architectural foresight.
Such a EW-DPOS would surely encourage new ideas to be implemented quicker and equally let bad ideas die off faster, this would naturally speed up the blockchain ability to evolve faster.
or go leave some ideas with @theoretical so when he create a new social media crypto it deals with DPOS damaging weaknesses revealed by Steem's experimentation.
https://steemit.com/blockchaindev/@theoretical/c3cjk-hello-world
You're absolutely correct on every point and in every detail.
Thanks!