Because of sock-puppets, botnets, and delegation, even weighting VP differently wouldn't eliminate the ability to mine the rewards pool.
However, all those techniques are more difficult than the present scheme, and entail more expense.
The various botnet, and sock-puppet schemes are penetrable, as @sherlockholmes is demonstrating daily.
Eventually, the decision as to weighting may be not in the control of Steemit, even stinc, at all, but up to the SEC.
Or whoever buys out the mined stakes and takes over the witnesses.
I don't know if Sherlock's work is sustainable, or if it is fairly rewarded however?
The more Steemit grows, the more of these Sherlock's you need, and most of these bot nets can simply move on and recreate the scheme with new accounts pretty easily. I don't think a reactive strategy will ever work, it's needs to be proactive, ie. not profitable enough to be worth abusing, or less profitable to abuse than act in line with standards.
You are not wrong regarding @sherlockholmes. I reckon he needs a staff already. He's up against moneyed interests with networks of thousands of bots on Steemit.
I am in agreement with you generally regarding bots. However, I am unsure that there can be a mechanism that completely makes such unprofitable at all.
It may be that security is a thing we need to buy, to some degree. Ain't sure.
At least it's being done some right now, and @sherlockholmes is the best at it I've seen. Unfortunately, I always run into his posts when I've depleted my VP =/
Like now =p
Even so, he exposes generally "smaller issues" than captain-votes-every-comment-$20 Craig-Grant and these top two reward pool pullers.
I don't think he has the SP or support to handle the big fish.
That may be. He also seems to focus on scams, rather than self votes. Perhaps there are other reasons for his focus, but from my read of his posts, he seems forthright regarding the reasons he looks where he does.
Also, not every investigation is fruitful, and those that get done first tend to be those folks less capable of scamming, as seems reasonable, and those get posted first. I know he's looking at botnets with thousands of bots, so he probably does need staff to do such work well.