Fantastic discussion here, fellas. I'm going to be covering a lot of these issues in the coming weeks in my series on the game theory of Steem. I haven't gotten to the parts about how we evaluate whether it's too top-heavy or not, but keep this in mind:

One of the central goals of Steem is to foster a wide distribution of cryptocurrency. As such, I don't think that the typical capitalist argument of "the rich shouldn't be told what to do with their money" is even really that relevant here. The rich (and I mean the very rich) are here specifically to build the system and keep the barriers low so that the distribution is wide. From that perspective, the incentives do feel a bit top-heavy at the moment.

On the other hand, were any of you around when Bitshares was first started up? Dan and company did WAY too much tinkering with the incentives there, so it became very difficult to keep track of how the system worked, and I think we failed to learn lessons well because no one incentive scheme stuck around long enough. So for now, I think we need to wait and see how things play out.