If witnesses are like judges, like you wrote, then I agree. It is similar to letting those who own land vote, historically speaking in the United States, and that can be a better system.
I would favor a hybrid of Steem witness nodes as the main core fused with an option, an extension, of Bit Torrent or IPFS or P2P style or Bitcoin like seeding or mining as a way to help distribute and redistribute Steem content, the web pages, etc, to help seed the content in a decentralized method, assuming it doesn't already do that.
RE: Open Letter To Steem Community