That's a great suggestion. Makes a lot of sense.

I agree, those 2 features are the ones preventing consensus to be reached.
I say take them off HF17 so we can discuss them further, all the other changes are good and non controversial.

EDIT:  Actually I'm not sold on SP delegation either. 

SP delegation will allow large stake holders to completely bypass the current experiment as they will be able to easily delegate power to themselves and use all their voting power.  Users have a lot more power now, even minnows can make a small difference so I don't see the point of this feature.
We need something like an investor class to incentivize large stake holder to not vote.

More on investor class https://steemit.com/hardfork-17/@steemitblog/patience-with-the-hardfork-there-must-be-consensus#@snowflake/re-freebornangel-re-snowflake-re-liberosist-re-freebornangel-re-steemitblog-patience-with-the-hardfork-there-must-be-consensus-20170320t224904820z

Good comment though I disagree with this: 

>then work on convincing witnesses why the comment reward pool is a good idea for Hardfork 18. 

The reward curve super-linearity needs to be reduced first. This is a change that is wanted by a lot of users, stakeholders, and witnesses (I almost regret not polling about it, but we were trying to keep it focused on what is at hand rather than a future update). However, its implementation might have been premature because there was so much else going on, and it was pulled from this hard fork release.

Reward curve first, see results, and only then talk about a separate comment pool again. Even if a flatter reward curve doesn't materialize the hoped-for comment rewards, a separate comment pool comes with its own issues and baggage.

I want to see a more focused, less "omnibus" approach to major changes being made to Steem for the future, so that the potential positive and negative consequences of any change can be discussed and explored in-depth.

Edit: I have made a post about why the Steem reward pool is better left whole: https://steemit.com/steem/@pfunk/arguments-for-keeping-the-steem-reward-pool-whole