Thanks for yet another brilliant article. You are pretty much spot on in all your assessments. Needless to say, we were of course very well aware of all the exploitable details of this campaign. Particularly the cost of boosting a new user to rep lvl 30 or 40 was a carefully calculated risk. We wanted to make this an opportunity to all Steem users - not only the high reps. We were aware of the leaked private keys from user's misuse of memos and generally had a rather good and detailed analysis on the possible ways to abuse the system.
We were aware, that while some would use the opportunity to just buy a boost, others would perhaps feel a reason to start posting quality content and engaging more in the Steem community, no matter which Steem based community they were from.
We naturally monitored the situation and when the abuse got too high compared to legit use, we moved to make a change that actually implemented some of the suggestions you wrote here. There is now a check for creation date on users, only allowing Steem users created prior to the original announcement to receive the attestation award. The reward for lower reputation levels are halved to make it unprofitable to buy boost.
Then, why on earth didn't we set out with a much might tight and waterproof system from the get-go? Well, the main reason being the ease of use and a wider spread of the word. Having users jump through too many hoops and setting up various mechanisms preventing users from getting rewards would have caused a lot less visibility. The way we did it caused the word to spread like wildfire. I am not sure that would have been the case, had we done it any other way.
RE: How Byteball airdrop is screwing over the Steem community