I noticed you mentioned this twice, and it's a key point:

Not doing this is against the economic best interest of the majority. The end result will likely mirror the distribution of mining pools where there are less than 10 individuals deciding the entire consensus.

I like how DPOS encourages people to vote based on their own long-term interests which are for the entire network, not some immediate financial gain. I also agree with Vitalik's comments about the information asymmetry involved (i.e. politics) in trying to keep voters engaged and informed enough to make good decisions. To test this, I wrote some code last night to analyze voter engagement (using an arbitrary definition of "had to post at least once" to mean an "active" account) to find we only have 7.5% engagement among active accounts. If you call > 100 posts active, that percentage grows closer to 50%. Still though, I think we as a community have some work to do to explain to people the importance and benefit of regularly voting on witnesses and keeping those votes updated as things change. I plan to do a regular weekly report to show how the voting engagement is changing over time and who the top accounts by VEST are who are not voting for a witness.

You can read more here: How Many Steemians Are NOT Voting for a Witness? I Found the Answer!