There are a lot of wrongheaded ideas, but let's start with the most glaring one that I found:
Steem Power rewards - 20% of all post payouts should be shared by all SP holder according to their SP ownership. People with more SP get more.
No. Just no. Post rewards are rightly distributed to the people who wrote the content and those that curated it. What you're suggesting is my hard work and effort reward everyone else who had no hand whatsoever in making that happen.
You mention voting power being linked to SP, while simultaneously being upset that whales are granted more weight in curation rewards than others. They have more SP.
As for curation bots, manual curation takes a metric fuckton of time. I manually curate heavily every day, and I don't have nearly the reach I'd like to have. Since I know several authors who consistently put out good content and wouldn't be caught dead putting out garbage, why can't I automate voting for them? Sure there's room for abuse, but there is a robust and healthy community fighting it.
The 30 minute post limit was put in place because there was reward pool raping going on prior to its implementation. It prevents the level of spam that I witnessed firsthand last year when the platform first opened to the public, and that's why it was implemented.
Finally, whales by and large earned what they have. Those posts making hundreds of dollars a day? More often than not they either invested heavily in the platform to begin with (like most of the devs and high-end witnesses) or they had a substantial following that transitioned to Steemit, bringing more people on board (like The Dollar Vigilante). Moreover, if you read the white paper, voting power is designed to diffuse to more users over time, thus reducing the scope of power the whales have without additional investment in.
RE: Will Steem succeed or commit suicide?