You are very correct. One of the most significant problems with the current vote weighting scheme on Steemit is that it is so prone to financial manipulation, rather than simply being useful to promote valuable content.

The white paper makes this very clear "...algorithms must be designed in such a manner
that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit."

HF19 reduced the incentive to manipulate curation for financial purposes by making VP weighting by SP linear, rather than exponential, but this isn't a fix, merely mitigation. HF19 also increased the rate at which VP decays by 400%, and this has resulted in an explosion of self voting - almost solely due to financial manipulation.

I acknowledge that devs are human with limitations on their time and ability to build Steemit, so hope my comment doesn't imply I think they need to fix everything I think is wrong right now. I do want, as you have, to keep these issues in the conversation, so that while the devs are furthering Steemit's journey down their roadmap, these problems that need fixing can be addressed soon.