This is a great post and I agree with many things you said.

However, there is one fundamental thing you need to understand. Our brains as humans is too small to understand how economies work. We cannot compute all the cause effect relationships that will come from higher curation rewards. I am sure that this will be an improvement, but in reality we have to try out to know for sure.

What Ned has been proposing (and what you don't seem to get) is the following: Let us stop wasting time on tweeking the game theory of steem. It will never be perfect. There will always be problems. You will never choose the right rules for the system, no matter how much you think.
Let us instead create SMTs, there will be thousands of coins competing against each other. Each of them will have different rules, some will have delegating allowed, some will have it banned, etc...

This is the key idea: The optimal coins from a game theory perspective are the ones that will survive.

If a coin has bad rules, like steem right now, then people will stop using it and move to another SMT, maybe created by yourself, which has better rules. If something better comes up later, then with enough time it will overtake your coin. This will go on forever, with improvements always made, and users always slowly navigating towards the best SMT.