can I have both of your opinions on how this helps the little guys

It doesn't. It sure helps Jerry a lot though.

Surely this model is reliant on constant and increasing investments to maintain the promised payouts and thus becomes unsustainable aka ponzi

No, he's not doing anything except collectivizing self-voting. Imagine ten users get together and each of them can post once per day. If they put all of their SP in the same account, that account can upvote all their posts and use all its voting power to do so.

That's essentially all Jerry's doing on a larger scale, except that if the ten users set up their own account to do it they would have account ownership and get that account's SP growth, curation rewards, and witness vote. In Jerry's system he gets all of that. He also gets ownership of the SP; I don't know if people are going to have the right to withdraw or not, there's too much doublespeak here.