Hi firebat,
When I speak about Contributors in these posts, I mainly refer to developers. This means:

• There may be not a post to reward them at all
• The post may be undervalued and so the author's reward from it
• I am not a whale so I am not able to reward enough the work of a developer with just an upvote

Plus, the idea is to reward those who are not rewarded by the system itself, for any reason it may be.

The meaning I give to "cashing out" is "sell for usd" (or btc)...
I am not cashing out steem.
I am not selling steem either.

I am simply powering down my own Steem Power (non liquid token) to receive Steem (liquid token) and be able to transfer them.
(Once I have Steem I actually can distribute them both as Steem or Steem Power, preventing any immediate sell of the reward and encouraging a long time participation into steem/steemit)