Since I have some experience with this, I’ll add some color. It is all well and good to only have one purpose, but politics is the art of the possible. Let’s take 80970(voter-based rewards) as an example. Here is the deliberation thread: ReProposal: Spam Prevention - Convert from system-based rewards to voter based rewards
The first mention of any kind of voter-based rewards system actually occurred on April 17th in another thread seeking to address spam with an ‘accept’ threshold: Proposal to restrict rewards qualification to a threshold - #30 by skilesare. By the time we get to the end of this thread I’ve just about resolved that it is a no go and the only way forward is to reset weights back to 1. So I propose it and get roundly rejected: Internet Computer Network Status. Later in July DFINITY would make this proposal again and it would pass(Way forward on spam - Proposal for tactical fix).
Later, DFINITY specifically mentioned that they wanted a comprehensive solution to the problem(I can’t find this quote at the moment, but I think it was in their reasoning for voting against 56801).
So…I did some more thinking and on May 9th I suggested a comprehensive solution. It included the initial text of what became 80970 as well as the advertising spam proposal(ultimately rejected), resetting proposal costs, and affirming a resolution about the value of following in liquid democracy. One person said they didn’t like the affirmation…so I took it out. DFINITY did an analysis and it all kind of died. This is also the first time that there was ever any mention of using the ‘abandoned ICP’ for something else because @bjoernek was expressing concerns that spam could be incentived by the fact that lower inflation was possible, so I made a suggestion of putting the inflation into the community fund if that was an issue. (Proposal to covert from system based reward to voter based reward; to implement an accept quorum mechanism; and to return the reject cost to 1 ICP - #13 by skilesare)
There was a bunch of kerfuffle at the end about this and I guess we should have seen the issues that would arise out of 80970.
A good moral of this one was that, as you say, having too many issues in one proposal makes it even harder to discuss them.
When 80970 did initially come back up, I only included the one point about switching to a voter-based system. But, as politics is the art of the possible, significant participants suggested that we should reset the weights to 20 for governance and that we should track the ICP that wasn’t minted. As one was a previous approval of the network and one was a simple variable, it didn’t seem like much of an add to get something across the finish line that a broad set of people had indicated support for. So even the best intentions can lead to things getting muddled.
Put another way…you can have one idea…a good one…and then someone comes along and says…“I like your idea, but only if we also have X” and now you have a problem. What is X? Is it material? Will others think it is material even if it isn’t?
I think it takes discipline and there may be structure to how these things emerge out working groups that help with this.