I think that voting is only hard if you keep wanting one vote to mean one person.

I think this dogma doesn't make sense. Some people are "better" than others (on whatever metric you think is important: wisdom, foresight, whatever) and it makes sense for these people to have more of a say in a vote.

PoW is good when all we care about is what we should pay attention to, since it forces anyone that wants your attention to make a provable sacrifice. This means that people that care about their messages will have more "vote power", but that's good.

Prediction markets are good when we want to answer empirical questions about the future. The confident and wealthy will have more "vote power", but confidence is good, and the wealthy part is guaranteed for confident predictors that have good foresight.