Perhaps linear rewards can work in theory but the problem was when bots started to get involved. If you can keep the bots from being involved and make sure every vote comes from a verified individual account holder then maybe linear rewards has some meaning.
But right now on Steem linear rewards isn't working out well at all. Giving more power to minnows would work if minnows actually use it to curate the content. Content producers win if human beings can review the content rather than bidbots.
I didn't say linear rewards is the cause of the bidbots but I do think linear rewards while it had good intentions, had the opposite effect. It seemed to work in the beginning but then somehow human beings stopped curating and bots took over. With the bots now it doesn't work at all.
Linear rewards don't seem to work unless you can prove each account is human controlled and that all curation is done by actual brains and not bots. Linear rewards without KYC level verification of accounts is what led to the situation now I think. A whale could game the system before but we could see it, while now a whale can game the system in ways we cannot see it because any small account could be owned by the same whale.
Wouldn't a maximum Vote Power Cap for Steem do the same? Maybe based on the Network activity. That could break the SP Stacking in Whale Upvote Bots. Or make SP getting duller, maybe even in a logarithmic way.