"There's far too much "abuse" to be countered, which is the result of horrible changes to the blockchain protocols last year."

While those changes may have made the problems worse, they aren't the cause. All the problems pre-existed those changes.

The problem is stake-weighting.

I agree with almost all your points.

Ignoring stake-weighting as the root of the problem of financial manipulation will, as you point out that it has, result in endless loops of attempts to mitigate via other means, such as @sadkitten, which in turn bring on new problems, which require mitigation...

Wash, rinse, repeat...

While I strongly disagree that things can't get much worse, I share your hope that they don't.