There's a separate issue in gitlab now, to allow proposal creators to "lower" their daily payout, which I'm in favor of doing (this idea came out during the last Hive developer meeting). This would allow a proposal creator to "bargain" with the voters by offering a lower price without having to create an entirely new post and get everyone to vote on it again.
Beyond that, the simple solution to "too high" of amount requested is to not vote for it.
But the problem with long term proposals is they linger in the list, regardless of whether people vote for them or not, and they could potentially make it hard to find proposals you might want to vote for.
On the question of if too high, then don't vote on it, the truth is that it is not that simple.
Popular Hivers will 99% of the time get funded because most are voting blindly. For example, most will not question a proposal by you because most of us associate the beginning of Hive with blocktrades.
We should be able to account for each and every HBD regardless of whatever role we played in the realization of Hive or our level of visibility.
Basically make people accountable and make it trustless.
In most DAOs, the proposal system only judges the proposers by REALITY (don´t say that blocktrades is wrong but reputation can be a weak proxy for reality). In a DAO you claim that your proposal will have a certain influence on the network parameters like "this proposal will increase the number of active users ergo the long-term price (like a moving average) by 30cents". Either it will and you get payed a reward proportional to the price-move or your proposal was shit and you lose your stake, so will anybody else.
It is called prediction market (aka. futarchy) and it eliminates all trust. It is provably a collusion-resistant mechanism.
the best guys in the space research in that direction
Hanson, Robin 2013: Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs?
Buterin, Vitalik 2014: An Introduction to Futarchy
Merkle, Ralph, C. (Nick Bostrom, Vitalik Buterin, Robert A. Freitas Jr., Robin Hanson, Charles Hoskinson , John Oh, and Melanie Swann) 2016: DAOs, Democracy and Governance
Hayes, Ryan, Tran, Alexandra, Xu, Henry. 2018: Futarchy Considered: a guide to blockchain-based prediction markets and futarchy
The "DAC" described by Stan and Dan Larimer was not the same as a DAO, same as Steem is not a "Crypto" (because there is zero crypto inside the consensus mechanism, it purely is based on economics and a race condition). One could say that dPOS is a crypto-substitute and a dPOS DAC is similar to a DAO, but you cant make it trustless in that gametheoretical collusion resistant fashion. Not without changing the fundamental structure.
Reputation is definitely an important factor in getting funded. This isn't just true of Hive proposals, it's true of just about everything in life.
But I don't think this indicates a problem, as long as the person's reputation is deserved. Theoretically, a reputation should be strongly correlated with past performance, and maintenance of that reputation includes continuing to meet expectations, so it's generally only logical to fund people with good reputations, assuming their proposals also make sense.
Now, where this can break down is when someone's reputation doesn't accurately reflect reality. Unfortunately, this does happen more often than is desirable, generally through a process of rampant self-promotion, false claims, shilling, etc to create false reputations. This mostly happens when you don't get a chance to personally interact with the person involved (or at least, not an interaction where the reputational characteristic is observable), so that your knowledge of that person is mostly second-hand, and therefore more difficult to judge.
And this can lead to serious harm, as history has shown us, when people blindly follow someone who's supposed to be a great leader or some kind of special genius, but actually only possesses a complete lack of morals and can lie about their abilities without any compunction (and have others lie for them as well).
Because of the problems with our current methods of determining the correct "reputation" for people, one of my main goals is to enhance Hive so that it can allow for better "computation" of someone's abilities in various areas (e.g. various forms of reputation). After we get through our initial optimization of Hive, this is where I plan to spend a lot of my time.
Also, as an aside, I can say that it's not so simple as "founders get funded". For example, in BitShares, which was the precursor chain to Hive, the founder of that chain wasn't able to get funded for a number of proposals he made for that chain's worker proposal system. And arguably, that's one of the reasons he stopped working on that chain and started Steem. Now there were definitely reasons why he didn't get funded (he made a bunch of mistakes that had damaged his reputation), but it does show that being at the beginning isn't always enough.