One thing I have learnt is that mathematicians are needed to check the formulas and algorithms that underpin this platform - programmers and witnesses have different skills.
In this case, the formula is quite simple but it is the feedback loops that need to be considered. Amazingly, most ppl had never looked at this parameter, the current_reserve_ratio.
In my opinion the whole reserve rate logic is quite sane in general, the problem is only in the fact that it is only proportional to SP instead of something more content-related and dynamic like "recent reputation gains". Adding "number of upvotes in the last week" to the mix could seriously improve the situation.
Another possibly useful idea would be to separate financial transaction bandwidth (where the whales might indeed need some preference) from content bandwidth (where reputation and upvotes should matter more than SP).
I do not see where a feedback loop is being a problem here. Do you simply mean the big "rich get richer" loop where having a lot of SP lets you earn more SP faster?
I have been thinking it would help to have an additional and different way of voting for quality that doesn't involve SP. For example a point system based on a 1 to 5, 1 being low and 5 high that would be summed in addition to the SP votes and that would be used to determine the listing of trending posts. That way the people reading the post would determine it's quality. This would need to have a protection against bot use.
Do you know anything regarding Steem being designed to maintain a value similar to the US$? That would mean that there would be a mechanism present that when the price rises above a dollar to start another mechanism to devalue a Steem to maintain a US$ parity ideal.
I do not believe that more precise feedback would help much. The experience of most social networks shows that people rarely care to provide more feedback than a "like" or a "dislike". In the olden days there were social networks where people could rate photos by setting 1..5 stars, and as far as I understand, most people would either put 5 stars or ignore the photo. 1 star would correspond to "flagging".
In principle, there is nothing wrong with counting upvotes perhaps weighing them. If there were no extrinsic motivations for upvoting, it would be a decent indicator of content quality.
Unfortunately, and somewhat paradoxically, the financial incentivization system of Steemit, although conceived in the hope of raising content quality, plays a lot against this goal to a large extent, forcing way too many people to focus their efforts bluntly gaming the system rather than expressing themselves creatively.
This is even worse with curation rewards, where the current system motivates "curators" to upvote posts based on their author and current upvote numbers, not caring to read them through.
There are many secondary indicators of quality (how many people read the post out of those who saw it, and how many people out of those who read it upvoted it, how much total time people spent on the post, how many comments it attracted), and rewarding the curators for being able to predict a mix of such indicators could, in fact, force people to actually pay attention to the content, rather than the current upvote $ number. Same for the authors.
Steem is not designed to maintain a value pegged to dollar. Steem Dollar is (although it's not perfectly stable, as you may note).