Maybe Im late to the discussion, but I think governance needs to be separated in 2 stages, each with its own set of incentives and objectives:
- Who gets to vote: how votes are distributed? The objective is important to make sure participants have the incentive to vote thinking about the long term success of the ecosystem. This ultimately boils down to some form of weighting amount of token locked and time locked.
- How are the votes cast: the objective here is to make participation easier and to allow people to understand what they are voting. Since its not easy for every user to understand every aspect of every proposal, it falls under delegation possibilities.
We can call the (1) the participation incentives step, where users should be indifferent about where to stake or lock their tokens. They should only care about getting a number of votes plus other incentives.
(2) is where alignment is important, here it matters that the voter agrees with the direction nodes want to take the ecosystem so he can delegate properly. Here trust is important.
Separating this two stages makes it easier to think about incentives and to have a sensible policy. For example, as its being discussed, each token deposited gets the same rewards independently of what nodes are producing blocks and the nodes get a percentage of the rewards based on how many votes were delegated to them.
This also allow us to move beyond one token one vote, for example, what ties step one can factor in locking period.