Value is not necessarily the same as content. If I see a real community of users joining Steem, posting pictures of their dinner, and getting upvoted by their friends, all while helping to recruit other friends to join Steem, I'm not going to object to that at all. The content may be worthless in a broader sense but their presence is not, and it is perfectly fine to reward it.

To be fair I am not a fan of the superlinear concept, at least not beyond some very minimal level, because I do agree that it shuts out the non-stars if taken too far.

The 8%/year thing is kind of nonsense. Any successful cryptocurrency will grow in value by a lot more than 8%/year. Typical growth rates are 30% to hundreds of percent, even averaged over several years. Even passive (non-voting) investors who are 'losing' 8% per year would benefit enormously if Steem really took off, and getting the rewarding mechanism to work better is something that can help it do just that.

The reason to hold STEEM is not to milk out a few percent of more (potentially worthless) STEEM in rewards by exploiting the voting system, it is because you think that STEEM is going to be worth a LOT more in the future.