Keep in mind that under the current system, a whale can smack you over and over using their steempower ^2. At least under my idea, they could only do it once at steempower.

I think it's important to tie the voting power to steempower, because:

1. We still need to mitigate sybil attacks, i.e someone making lots of bots to mute you
2. We still need to give people a reason to buy steem power. This keeps the price of steem up and helps pay out posts in the first place.