So in Steem's case, one of its fundamental problems is the cost between honest and dishonest voting behavior.

I like that approach. When I brought up the problem of blind voting the counter arguments I heard were along the lines of "curators are supposed to maximize their curation rewards". As you know there is no direct way to punish anyone for misusing their stake by upvoting bid botted shit. Downvoting somebody's content will hit that content creator's rewards hard but even if some piece of bid botted shit content or advertisement is making a negative ROI, its upvoters are not.

We don't want Trending to be full of paid advertisements. Some selfish people will upvote them despite the efforts of other curators who downvote them to ensure paid advertisements are not making money. There is little you can do about the first kind of selfish curators unless they are content creators whose content can be downvoted as punishment.

To reach a tipping point where curation reward maximization is best done auto-voting quality we need to "concentrate all firepower" as Admiral Ackbar would put it, mostly on paid advertisements in Trending. The obvious shitposts designed to milk the reward system are mostly gone from Trending. We must also double down of finding very high quality content and upvoting it to the top of Trending for stake belonging to blind curation reward milkers to propel even higher.

When I asked Idi Amin whether he thought #newsteem was done realigning incentives by flagging on here, this was his response: