They don't have any such responsibility, what they are responsible for is running the nodes/servers and updating the price feed (ugh), all else is a matter of desire not of necessity.
I don't understand what you want me to provide since you seem to want me to demonstrate a negative proof. There have been a lot of suggestions and, much like your 2nd price action, they weren't considered fully in how a bad actor would overcome them. In the end, they all have one common thread: tax/burden the community and obfuscate undesirable behavior, unwittingly. You seem to think that by splitting stake up to jump over the hurdle is making abuse more obvious, but frankly I don't know how you can reason that, how it's easier to link multiple accounts together in a scheme than to simply recognize one abusive account.
Again, the way to realign incentives is not through Law but the enforcement of law, likewise, the flag enforces the law of "thou shall not voturbate" because implementing any such law is only at the expense of everyone who doesn't abuse self voting and it barely can be considered a hurdle to those determined to do the least for the most.
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I don't want you to provide anything, and I'm not the one that needs to be convinced. I'm content with either decision. I'm saying that the people who decide which version of code to run should demand more than an intuitive demonstration that the change will make things better.
What does better mean? In curation, "better" means that it is more likely to rank a set of posts in the correct order, according to user preferences. So, it seems to me that the witnesses who will run the code should ask whoever is proposing the change to provide some level of evidence that the post ranking after the change is likely to be more correct (closer to matching user preferences) than post ranking before the change.
Your argument seems self-contradictory. On one hand, you say that the rules don't matter - and we need to just depend on curators to downvote, but you're making that argument in support of a rule change. If we can't solve the problem of incorrect ranking of posts by changing the rules of the game, then why are we having this conversation at all?
The point of a content curation system is to produce a ranked list of content. Yes, from the voter's perspective, it's just "I rank this as x dollars", but a good content curation system will aggregate all of those individual decisions into an ordered set that approximates the actual combined preferences of the users so that readers can quickly find things of interest.
In that context, it is possible to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a particular voting scheme before injecting it into the blockchain.
You should read A Puff of Steem: Security Analysis of Decentralized Content Curation. There is much to learn, and it suggests several techniques by which the strengths and weakness of any proposal might be quantified before slapping it into the running block chain.
It's very simple to calculate. What is the Median power of an average voter? What is the power of a community vote? Of a bid-bot? Of a whale?
Case closed :D