What I mean by this is, someone was asking @Anonymint why his voting power was always fully recharged and he never used it. His SP is 2637 ($5000 or so). This is a relatively decent size sum of money indicating someone who has had a string of successful posts. Meaning people who post good or popular content would likely be one of the most logical choices for who should curate content.
That is not how the system works, though. You have the equivalent of Bitshares voter apathy again. On Bitshares you were voting in order to try and preserve your investment by regulating delegates. On here, you're voting more for curation economic gain, but the curation economic gain is minuscule for someone like Anonymint, so there's no real reason for him to do it besides doing someone else a favor.
It's kind of the opposite of Bitcoin game theory if you're under a certain threshold of SP. The incentives that are supposed to exist don't exist. This disincentivizes small purchasers of Steem or SP and is one of the biggest flaws of the system. You have to be invested with a ton of money to make the act of curation worth doing as a manual form of labor.
Which brings me to my next point. It doesn't actually have to be this way. The problem can be somewhat addressed with a tiered reward system. Think of it in the context of something like the Darkcoin masternode collateral lockup system. Once you lockup an arbitrary number of SP, it could trigger a threshold of package benefits.
Instead of weighting linearly from $0 to infinity, you could establish tiers and having $2000 of SP for instance, could change to a non-linear weighting. This might require a big restructure of the entire system, but that's never stopped Larimer before. Tier II could be $10,000, Tier III $100,000, and Tier IV $1,000,000.
The goal of such a system is to increase the power of smaller holders to give them some type of purpose in participating in the system at all. The whales could obviously Sybil attack with multiple accounts to benefit themselves, but it would just be replicating the current system if they did and not gaining any benefit above that.
Numbers example:
Let's say a $1000 SP holder currently has a voting power of 1 and a $100,000 SP holder has a voting power of 100. If you weight voting power by tiers and change it to non-linear, the $1000 SP holder could have a voting power of 2 while the $100,000 SP holder still has a voting power of 100. If the large holder decides to Sybil attack, his voting power just goes back to 200, so it's the same 1:100 ratio of voting power as before.
Before some large SP holder complains and says they don't want their power diluted, yes, you actually do, and I'll explain why. The reason a tiered reward system is needed is because when you see lots of big SP holders all powering down simultaneously, even if you personally don't want to power down, you know how much sell pressure that's going to create, so you're required to power down as well to maximize your returns.
By putting in a tiered system, you at least put in a floor of where the game theory doesn't force everyone else to power down based on what whales are doing and all sell at once in a rush to the exits.
(picture source: http://madmax.wikia.com)