RE: I want to have my cake and eat it too! (No more powerful whales, and the price of STEEM must go up!)
That's a step in the right direction, but only a step.
Mass adoption would mean that anyone that upvotes, comments or interacts in a meaningful way with the Steemit platform would be rewarded for doing so, regardless if whether they join a guild or not.
There will always be leaders who form focused groups around common interests, but that is still not the masses. Until the common user who mostly consumes information is rewarded significantly, mass adoption will be slow to embrace Steemit.
All these problems can be addressed, but until they are we will need curation guilds and whale support to retain and bolster new users SP until they can stand on their own.
If minnows had more voting influence from day 1, all of these measures would be unnecessary.
I think the main problem is that the system cannot afford to pay the "masses" of new users tons of money just for curating content. If everyone was getting paid a lot, the system would run out of money. I know this is oversimplifying things a bit, but it is probably the main reason why it is not setup this way today.
I would be interested to hear a proposal on how the problem could be solved in such a way that doesn't cost the system a significant amount of money, and does not encourage gaming of the system by opening up lots of little accounts.