True democracy doesn't really work. It develops into chaos very fast. Churchill is credited with saying "The biggest argument against democracy is a five minute discussion with the average voter" and I have to agree :D
People not voting isn't necessarily bad since if they don't care enough to vote then they probably wouldn't make a good choice anyway. I'm perfectly fine with spammers and apathetic users not being represented. (this applies to Steem and US government ;)
That said, I don't know how many of the quality users are involved in voting for witnesses. I personally haven't done much research on witness and haven't voted on many because of that.
Don't know if you've considered it, but one possible improvement to q-filter is to give extra points to blog posts where someone upvotes and comments. This normally shows they really appreciate it. Just a thought. I really like the idea of q-filter and have been trying to spread the word about it.
Apathetic users not having a say is fine, but the bigger issue is that they have a say forever unless they explicitly un-vote that witness. There is no expiration. The witness could do lots of bad stuff and would still retain a lot of delegated power from users that may not use the platform anymore.
For q-filter, the only issues with comments is that it is relatively easily to cheat the system by simply adding a cheap comment. But I am working on changes to qfilter which should benefit the regular users (the non-apathetic ones) with more regular votes and more weight in terms of the sort.
Essentially, I am planning on switching the upvote bot from a stake-weighted score to a participant-based score. I'm also adjusting some of the parameters and make the participant-based score favor those who participate frequently over those that don't. This makes it a little more resistant to apathetic users and also fixes that whales voting problem that was effecting you earlier.