Saith the Whitepaper:

In the real world, algorithms must be designed in such a manner that they are resistant to intentional manipulation for profit. Any widespread abuse of the scoring system could cause community members to lose faith in the perceived fairness of the economic system.

Sure, we get it. And I suppose we understand in theory that

Any compensation [abusers] get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining...

The only problem is, at what point do we change algorithms to become more accommodating to organic content creators? Because it's the good ones that are going to lose faith.

All that is necessary is to ensure that the abuse isn't so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.

....Um, I think we're at that point, @ned.