great post. You are fully right. Currently the reward system is not really welcoming to newcomers.

Here my thoughts about that:
To 1: Number of voters can be misleading, because currently you can make easily double accounts. I would suggest another solution that goes directly to the root of the problem:

Implementing an Universal Income
My suggestion is to make some kind of universal dividend to all fully verified accounts. Verification of account can be done per video chat or local meetups. The list of verified accounts can be voted on the same way like currently the witnesses. Once we have fully verified accounts I would suggest to cancel all or a big part of the curation rewards and distribute it as universal dividend to all fully verified accounts. This will soon increase the voting power of all fully verified minions.

Use a lottery to display trending posts
Further I would suggest to show by default trending posts in the following way: Each time you reload the page the top displayed articles are drawn like in an lottery. The more votes they have the more chance to be displayed at the top site. So even an small vote can increase the chance significantly to be displayed at the top site. This would also solve the problem, that the top voted posts get even more votes, just because they are displayed at the top.

Liquid Democracy - Implement delegation of voted
Further I would see botvoting not as a bug, but as a feature if done right.
In away botvoting is delegating your vote. If all participants can use delegation of votes in an easy way, we could create some kind of liquid democracy. Just imagine a whale would delegate his vote to all fully verified accounts then also minions would have a fair chance of upvoting something in an significant way. Or the wale could delegate his vote to some kind of audit organization or simply people he trusts. The wale could look from time to time if votes are conflicting and can remove people or add from his delegation list.

Make the payout linear instead of exponential
Also I would suggest to make the payout linear not exponential. I know exponential payouts are mend to hinder self votes, but his could be done in an more fair way and so or selfvotes are easy to detect and can be downvoted by wales.
this would also have the effect, that even with small steem power you can give some cents to posts (currently you need round about 300 steam power for one cent).

Reduce rewards / votes if the same account is voted again in the last 30 days
For example simple halve the vote if the same account is voted again in the last 30 days. This would lead to an much more fair payout distribution and hinder / reduce selfvotes.

Just my two cents.. Im looking forward for your thoughts about it!