I don't have any dream that this would be a permanent solution regarding the size of steemit, but what we need right now is to clean up the platform, and this would be the quickest and easiest approach in my opinion.

Vote selling yeah... well I haven't done the maths as to its profitability compared to my idea, but I don't think it's impossible that they could make just as much money from priority-selling. Using curation teams vastly spreads out that reward pool to a much larger field, and as more whales get on board, the bigger and more numerous curation teams become: more money for the many, but including the elites.