Thank you for seeing this. I also agree that we need more whales. If more don’t show up, veBAL will end up being run by a few entities, many of whom seem quite centralised at the moment, and this is a far cry from the dream of a decentralised future for money that I think brought us all here.
That being said, large, long term HODLers, (should)have the most vested interest in ensuring that the economy remains healthy. Having a few entities black-holing most of the emissions into a pool no one else can really get good capture on can harkens back to the SPIDERMAN/BATMAN Roosh drama that was a big part of the whole short-lived solidly thing.
One or 2 whales trying to take over to support specific and limited interests in not healthy, and as a representative of a large veBAL HODLer that intends to get much larger, this is not where we want to see things go.
I think the DIGG conversation is about having some sort of an objective and sensible matrix that all gauges are applied to, both old and new. To govern gauge removals based on that. If this framework leads to killing gauges that no one thinks should be killed, or allowing 10s of percent of the total veBAL vote to be used to direct rewards in a manner that does not support a robust ecosystem with the most(or at least many) possible parties participating, it should be changed before further actions are taken.
Gauges can get problematic, and frankly too many gauges can just become very burdensome to manage.
So: I don’t think we should be talking about killing any gauges right now, and while I do not support this proposal. I do think @zekraken’s idea of coming together to discuss in more detail and build frameworks around what is healthy makes a lot of sense. Because of the way the system is structured, and there are no way to regulate emissions at the veBAL level, these frameworks will have to be enforced/maintained based on a combination of decisions about changing the operation of meta-governance layers like AURA and graviAURA to try to meet the requirement of a framework, and Balancer governance killing some gauges when that doesn’t work.
I think there are really 2 issues that should be addressed, and I suggest someone put more time into thinking it through and we maybe discuss it in a less pointed thread.
1: There are too many gauges, and many of them seem to go week after week with no, or close to no votes. It creates bad UX and eventually will break snapshot or something 
2: There are some gauges that have very few participants, unimpressive trading volume, but are receiving a substantial portion of systemwide emissions. To me it’s less about fees, and more about making sure everyone has a chance to Farm the good stuff and that Balancer governance is being more widely distributed.
As I said, I like the direction this is going, and I like these conversations.
Here was our first attempt at BADGER to deal with our own system not spinning out of control, which was prompted by @solarcurve’s concerns on the graviAURA/auraBAL/ETH gauge vote:
https://badger.com/gravity-news/graviaura-regulation
Note that this is currently a flexible policy space governed by a council elected by Badger Token HODLers, who have all been long standing members of our community and share values of partner-first, ecosystem centric BUIDLing.
As we learn and understand more and have good frameworks and models that have been validated by real world use and tested against extreme scenarios in planning exercise, we can move towards more fixed governance to be voted on by token HODLers. Also note that only 2 of the 7 Badger Councillors are on the core team or do significant other work for BADGER, so they are quite independent.
Also note that the stated objectives are to balance supporting a healthy ecosystem and generating revenue for the DAO. This document also takes into account that things need time to develop and manifest themselves.
