I understand that you might feel that way, but think it’s worth considering how this approach might be perceived, and the unintended consequences it could have for the ecosystem as a whole. When incentives are tied to voting, even indirectly, it can create a dynamic where votes are valued for the wrong reasons. Over time, this erodes the integrity of the governance system, which is meant to prioritize network security, reliability, and trustworthiness above all else.

What does "focus on your witness operations" really mean?

Witness rewards aren't really high. And I'm saying it as a consensus witness. At some point once you are higher in the ranks it's like a full time job if you want to do it properly. You do it either yourself or you hire people to assist you. You need to be aware of what's going on with the code in the upcoming changes, choose whether to support them, make sure your upgrades go smoothly, preferably run a node in a mirrornet, a public seed node for a mainnet, maybe a full API node so the startup projects doesn't have to run their own, of course have a backup nodes, monitoring services, test environments.

If witness earnings are being shared or redirected, it’s always at the expense of these critical operations.

And of course - up to you :-)