Pretty clear voice in a jungle of complainers. Thanks for sharing your toughts.

So actually, right now, we are inside an online, hot wallet&miner for steem, and this wallet have a feature, a social media, content-sharing platform, where the stake-ers can influencing the distribution of daily reward pool, based on the amount of the stake, and same time, increase their amount of stake, based on their own social, community activity.

If we watch it from here, the 50-50 is definitely a wrong choice.

Btw the problem of "dead", but working curation trails, and the autovotes, so this problem have a really easy solution.
Just need to change the api, and this kind of transaction, the voting, need a confirmation time to time, for example 30 days.

So if you dont re-confirm your autovote in 30 days, this will be end, and no more "free" curation reward.
This is pretty understandable, i think.

If a node, on any blockchain, doesnt work anymore, i mean, doesnt react to the happenings, doesnt update itself, this is just a dead node, and dont need anymore for the chain.

On steem, the witnesses are the miners, and we are the nodes. I know, its not exactly the truth, but good metafora.