You do realize that the voting system that we have in steem witnesses is functionally identical to the voting system that we have to slice up the reward pool, right?

That is to say, it literally depends and scales based upon the amount of vests in your account. It is not, contrary to some popular belief, simply a straight "number of votes" voting system. Like everything else that ultimately uses rshares under the hood, it's all Proof of Stake.

That would actually be no change at all.

Honestly, the best suggestion I can offer you is "don't do that." You are effectively asking me "what's the best way to drive this screw with a hammer?" The tool you're bringing to bear on the problem is the wrong tool for the job.

Among the mismatches the fact that steem is a public blockchain and every single transaction which occurs on it is public runs directly counter to the aims of your project, which is to control access to content. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

At heart, beyond the public versus private dichotomy, you have a problem which will always exist for the steem blockchain as it is constituted and designed from the ground up: content older than five days old cannot be given value. That's a hard limit. It would require at minimum a hardfork to fix, and you might be surprised how many things under the hood might break as a result.

These are the two biggest problems and that there really aren't suggestions or solutions to them. They are quintessential.

If you want to establish a distribution network/publisher based on a public blockchain, and especially this public blockchain, those of the big hurdles.

And that sucks, but it's the nature of the world. I think you have picked the wrong project.

You would be better off rereading hardfork 20 and what it's going to bring to the platform and start putting together an interface which will take advantage of the opportunities for curation of content that is being posted anyway, possibly taking as inspiration Utopian.io and publications on Medium. If you can get a prime seat at the table for that, focusing on literary content, you may have an operable project.