I just had a pleasure to read your amazing comment @mikehamm

Seriously big respect for sharing your thoughts and for your time

Very few stakeholders are spending time looking for quality contributions to reward

How about looking for a method to actually reward people that read the post and make a valid comment on the content of the post. You have to find a way to do this without rewarding the bots that go around upvoting or downvoting automatically also.

This new 50/50 reward system can only work if so called Whales would actually start delegating their Steem Power to quality curators. That would indeed allow those curators to be rewarded for their work and benefit entire platoform.

I'm simply afraid, that this will not happen. That at the end most whales will continue auto-upvoting publications of very few people, with their powerful votes and without putting any effort they will start earning x2 more than they did so far.

It surely would encourage them to slow down with powering down, which in effect would most likely bring up the price of STEEM. But that is the only positive outcome. And what would happen year from now, when those "whales" would start dumping this easily earned STEEM?

In my opinion, simply increasing the curation rewards will only result in fewer people writing posts on Steemit.

Yep. People will only care about buying STEEM and delegating it to bots and enjoying rewards (which will double now).

Yours
Piotr