I agree with this view.
Disclaimer: I’m not a DOT hodler (I’m on a project on another Substrate chain), but I love this forum because I look for - and every week find - examples of poor governance, conflict of interest, reckless spending, etc.
Today I spotted this gem 
:
DAOplomats are not compensated for coordinating this engagement. We are, however, part of the Uniswap DAO’s delegate incentives programme, which compensates for our engagement in governance at the Uniswap DAO.
It’s unbelievable what goes on here, and it’s even more unbelievable that there’s so little resistance to it (which is even worse, because it shows few people even bother to stop it because many use or hope to “work the system” the same way). The above works exactly the way political parties work with cronies and lobbyists.
My objective is to spot these examples, learn what not to do and be able to reject such attempts in my DAO. We share some the same tools (have a Council, democracy votes, tips).
Some comments to the OP:
That’s one of my objectives on my network for CY25: use reasonable incentives to increase the use of on-chain identities, not just for validators but also nominators and voters. Maybe add a tiny boost to votes proportional to the completeness of their on-chain identity?
I suspect countering sybil attacks and vote incentivization won’t be very effective: people will farm small accounts and create fake activity on social media, either by outsourcing or automating.
Personally I think tools for better insights can help. I am interested in creating “voting record” reports for whales and maybe more (I haven’t started doing anything yet, but I plan to start looking for various Graph QL examples for Substrate chains, and modify those for voting-related queries/reports). Many dislike chain analytics because it diminishes privacy, but anyone who votes on the use of common resources should expect scrutiny.
(For wallets that use tokens/assets/apps and simply transfer stuff from A to B, I don’t care about analyzing their activity.)
My only objection is “irrational votes”. The way democracy works, “irrational vote that wins” is considered rational. Maybe replace that with “undisclosed conflict of interest” votes?
I’d like to have a “statement of interest” (can be a checkbox) for all involved, including curators, so that people properly record their conflict of interest or lose reputation (or funding) when/if it gets discovered at a later stage.
As an aside, if you build this it would be nice if the UI be modular so that it can be adjusted for use by other Substrate chains.