I wrote a whole post on this topic with quite a lot of commentary, if you want to check it out.
I agree, it's tricky to educate people on what an ideal witness is. It's not a popularity contest. It should be someone who is adding value to the network and thinking long-term about what's best for everyone involved.
How did I miss that post, great analysis Luke, one thing I would like to add to the discussion is in relation to the split of rewards. It's touched on by lots of commentators but not examined in detail.
Part of the genius of Steem is the fact that some of your stake is locked up for a little while, currently 13 weeks. The broken peg means that authors can now effectively circumvent this feature when getting new payouts. No longer is the post payout 50:50. I think back to some of the big early adopters who got 15k for their first post. They could only cash out half and the remainder became an incentive to keep an interest in Steem. Having stake is a powerful incentive!
This distribution of payouts is broken at moment.
Yes, and it also disincentives curation which can lead to more people using vote bots to get noticed. Some have suggested we change the payout option to have more than 50% SBD, but I'm not a fan because the security of a DPOS blockchain is based on the stake weighted votes in SP. There has to be an incentive to keep a lot of people holding SP to keep the blockchain secure and the governance decentralized.