Thank you for highlighting the issues and the outlined proposal.
What would be the incentive towards decentralization (or here, “number of pools”) via the use of the Pledge leverage? It seems as though it would form clusters of sorts similarly to current setup, is that what you hint in your first point about PoS systems / the inevitability of concentration of affluence? (and if that is the case, wouldn’t an artificial k still be a better option?)
FYI - Another proposal was looking at tweaking the reward model directly: CIP 7 - “Pledge Curve Benefit”