"...Every block that an account is at 100% vote power is lost potential. The goal is to get as many accounts under 100% vote power at all times. This should lead to rewards being spread out due to the lack of consensus among whales as to what defines quality content..."

In other words, don't blame the developers for trying to balance the powers, they had to change the X votes per day because some of the whales weren't voting enough (or barely at all apparently).

Dear Developers: I understand your motivation for wanting to lower the ceiling, but I think what you really need to do is just convince more whales to vote more often. An alternative would be to build into Steem an auto-correcting protocol which could offset the lack of votes by temporarily upping the effect of all votes by whatever the difference is for any given block. It might not do anything for diversity, but at least it would end the senseless waste the potential steem that could be produced but isn't because of people leaving their accounts sitting at 100% voting power all day.

Dear Whales: Please don't let this change to the number of votes per day set you back from voting. As was already said, you can vote as many times as you want. There aren't any real penalties for voting more than the optimum number of times, however there is an overall penalty to the community as a whole when you don't vote at all (less steem is produced on the blockchain). And please keep in mind that your voting power should never be at 100%. That statistic is psychologically backwards because when you have 100% voting power what it really means is that you've only accomplished 0% of your voting work for the day. And when whales don't vote the entire community suffers from it (literally, it's built-into the blockchain). So please keep voting, in fact, vote more often.