"And ultimately a hard fork change removing self voting as an option from the Steem blockchain"
Not productive. Will simply punish the low level users. All large abusers will simply recreate sock puppets, delegate, vote trade. I do not support this.
"However we feel it is widely held, we certainly do, that these rewards should be awarded by peers, not the commenter."
I'm concerned this is turning into a witch hunt. I don't feel this premise has been proven.
How will it punish low level users? For low level users they have only had any kind of self voting effect at all since hard fork 19, which is a matter of weeks.
Whether the premise is convincing or not this is not a witch hunt. The idea is to be only minorly discriminate in flagging (if we end up going down that route).
I think this is a better reply to your first question than I will generate here in an ad-hoc fashion:
https://steemit.com/steem/@sean-king/life-ain-t-fair-and-neither-is-steem-deal-with-it-and-self-vote-away