the witnesses do A LOT of work, and they do not have the time or willpower to justify all their actions

This is a generalization. Some witnesses do a lot of work. Some others don't do anything and post excuses like "I have a day job folks" or "see last week update" where last week update was already "see last week update" or don't post an update at all.

As a reminder, witnesses are paid in average 1500 STEEM per day, which at current rate corresponds to north of 60k USD per month. As I explained in an earlier post in this thread, this is the fixed salary a successful quant trader or portfolio manager makes on Wallstreet, or the salary of 6 senior developers in the US or 20~40 experienced developers in developing countries. And all that witnesses are effectively required to do is run a node on a decent dedicated server (cost $100 per month) and upgrade whenever there is a hard fork (a few hours of work per month) => source: I am running a node too.

The excuse (because yes this is an excuse) for witnesses to receive that crazy pay is that witness pay is in theory supposed to be a "hired by the blockchain" kind of deal to pay for developments, marketing etc. Although this was how it worked on Bitshares, this is completely untrue on Steem. Steem comes with a builtin mechanism to raise funds for specific projects: blogging, and this mechanism is far superior to the old Bitshares witness model because it forces the developer who wishes to raise funds for a project to make a convincing post to present his project, give updates etc. We have seen it at work: so far the blogging and voting system has helped funding many apps, projects, websites, helpful bots, marketing efforts, reachout efforts, evangelization efforts etc and Steemians are rushing at the gate everyday with new ideas and new projects all more awesome than ever. It works just fine, and all these people do orders of magnitude more work than what witnesses have shown they were doing so far (for the ones who do anything at all), and for a far more realistic pay that the community explicitly approved.

But the more ironic of it all is that, in spite of the fact witnesses are already ridiculously overpaid for the work they don't even necessarily do, the ones who end up actually doing something useful end up posting about it, and get showered with cash (like if what they receive as witnesses wasn't enough already). Example Hive account@arhag: that's a witness who does some work, but guess what, each time he posts about what he does he is showered with more cash than what he would have received at a normal firm for doing the job. Just look at his posting history. Nothing wrong with that, except for the fact he (like every other witness, not pointing at Hive account@arhag in particular) is already receiving 60k USD worth of Steem Power per month for doing precisely that!

Conclusion, witness pay is redundant. It can be trivially and obviously determined by looking at witnesses blogs that witnesses, like everyone else who does useful work for Steem in the ecosystem, are already being generously rewarded by the posting reward system. All that witness pay effectively covers that the posting reward doesn't cover is the cost of running a node on a dedicated server, keeping updated with release news, and upgrading steemd timely. That's certainly not worth 60k USD / month.

Bottom line: witness pay is the most absurd money grab in the whole system, and before trying to "balance" better the rewards between bloggers who for the large majority do actual real work, we should focus first on putting an end to this Steem Power hemorrhage that sees more than 1M USD worth of Steem getting pocketed every month by a handful of users whose only real added value is to run and upgrade steemd nodes.

Now how could we improve that? It's very simple. This is Steem and not Bitshares. All and every initiative including developments, marketing, tools etc. should be financed using the posting and voting mechanism. Under that assumption, there is no more reason to give such an extravagant salary to witnesses, and the funds can be reallocated to content rewards and the block reward reduced so that witnesses would receive a more reasonable pay for the job of running and maintaining a node. The witnesses who actually did stuff can now use the same fund raising mechanism as every other Steemian, and their "fame" as witness will surely help them receive generous rewards for their work.