As I had pointed out upthread, the tradeoff is the inability to accept surges in transaction activity beyond some threshold. I am not clear if there are any applications within the current Steemit usage which will suffer for that, but it is a limitation that wouldn't be there with transaction fees.

However, I don't see that as the major priority issue to discuss.

A higher priority spam issue is the bots which are polluting the comments. The bot will win the war of attrition against the users manually downvoting them. I don't see a good solution to that which doesn't involve transaction (comment posting) fees. Do you?

(eventually someone is going to wake up and realize I am a strong designer of technology combined with marketing talent, which is a rare combination especially given I can also code with the best of them ... and I am eager to work right now ... you guys don't want me to fork this ...)

Edit: a potential solution not employing transaction fees, is to fight bots with bots. Given my recent realization that minnows aren't financially motivated to curate thus curate on conscience, they could be incentized to install bots which fight back against other bots.