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