This is the first thing that came to my mind. Maybe some parts could be useful or all of it.
Something like creating communities for creators to share their work. For example we have a community for digital landscape art. And people instead of zapping individual posts there, they'd zap the whole community. Zaps would be shared evenly between all creators. These communities would work something like NIP-172 you championed where creators would have to be approved first before they could be a part of it. Everyone else isn't able to post there but only to zap, like, comment, etc...