This will have my support. Speaking as a smallholder, due to their numbers, we shouldn’t allow smallholders to submit proposals directly to Snapshot unless we’re sure the community wants them to be able to do that, otherwise governance would get bogged down easily, eventually grinding to a halt; vote delegation is the way to signal that want, and it serves as a defense against attackers since malicious actors will lose their delegations. This doesn’t solve independent largeholder attacks, but those are less frequent and are a related but separate attack vector.
25k vBNT is a good starting point, it’s not terribly high but it’s big enough to be a good signal. Allowing delegates to submit proposals offloads some of the overhead to them, and it also allows delegates to pick proposals they like from the forums and give them a more serious weight by putting them to the voting floor. We could increase the minimum vote duration and allow proposals to be submitted at an arbitrary time, letting delegates work on their schedule while simultaneously allowing governance as a whole to consider their respective decisions more carefully.
I have only one question, though it may be discussed at length in another thread. Delegates are going to be devoting significant time to reviewing proposals and voting. Optimally, they would devote at least office hours to the task. This would likely have to replace a full-time job, but obviously they must still be able to buy food, pay bills, and so on. My question is, how are we going to compensate delegates for their time? Do we consider the Voter Turnout thread in that plan?