No, I never said that "the economic incentives can't affect behavior at all", you want so much to "be right" that you feel the need to strawman my argument.
On the contrary, I believe economic incentives are the PRIMARY driver of human behaviour. Now please read again and try to understand what I mean
then what compels you to believe that in this particularly instance economic reform is not apposite if it's the primary driver of behavior? I dont understand your argument and would wager not many do
Indeed, it is a complex argument, I can only fault myself for not being able to explain more clearly.
I am of the opinion (and I believe @yabapmatt has a similar opinion) that time is of the essence. We, steem, do not have all the time we want to keep experimenting. We have a clear interest to focus on implementing the best, most effective changes sooner rather than later.
Thus I do not claim that the current economic system of steem cannot be improved upon, I'm pretty sure it can, but that is not the same to say that "it's easy to come up with a better one".
Even change has a cost. Stability in the rules of economic interaction has value. In my opinion, spending effort (and time) in order to improve the economic system of steem a little is a serious strategic mistake and should not be done. In a sense, when you have a lot of people relying on a set of rules for a great many economic and social interactions, it often makes sense to stick with a less-than-perfect system than to improve just a little. You want to be reasonably sure that the changes will represent a significant improvement
Without serious testing, it is very hard to predict how a complex socio-economic system with 200 000 users will react to any set of changes in incentives. Absent a large scale trial (which is almost impossible to organize), there is a serious risk that what we think will happen does not quite materialize. And on the contrary, a host of "unintended consequences" and unexpected behaviors surface ... because humans are very complicated and hard to predict, especially in large groups. BTW, this phenomenon plagued communism, which some people thought it would work, before it was tried out for real ...
Regardless of whether your changes or a different set of changes to the economic rules will bring an improvement, something will still be missing: the social dimension which is almost completely absent: steem is primarily defined as an economic proposition (blog to earn, play games to earn, etc.)
So what I'm saying that, when time is of the essence, when we should focus our efforts and channel scarce resources into the most effective evolution of the global system, it is a lot more efficient to unite and take care first of the social dimension at the cost of putting up with an imperfect (yet almost workable and, what's more, known) economic system.
Keep the economic system as it is (for the time being at least) and work on creating a social fabric first and foremost. Once that is built, you might notice that the economic system is good enough. Or, if not, you can still come back to perhaps changing it, but starting now from a more solid base