I completely agree with your assessment on downvoting! Nothing to add there.

As for the curation debate, I don't have a problem with curators making a bit more for doing good curation but I don't see how this will solve the problem of poor curation. It's hard for me to debate policy because a lot of it goes back to ideology, and I am in an ideological minority here...but I think we are just carrying over the problems of society at large and experiencing them in a microcosm and therefore able to experience how it all plays out at lightning speed and in great detail.

I think @liberosist hit the main point of the problem in his/her first sentence. It's a issue of culture. People go where the money is, they go where here is the most to gain for themselves. So we are trying to patch up the main issue but it will always still be there unless we hit it head on.

Some people say this is just human nature but we can only fairly say that it's human nature in a given set of circumstances. If we trust in the system and in others and trust that our contributions will be rewarded fairly, the motivation to be entirely selfish nearly disappears and we all start working together.

That trust is broken, which is way pay4vote has become such a big thing, it's why there are probably more autoupvotes than real reads, and unless we work on the culture, nothing is going to get better.

Your suggestions may help a little but I don't see a way to really fix the issue of trust when here is such a huge disparity betweenness whale votes and minnow votes. I know there are all kinds of reasons for letting whales have more weight but it make sure a vibrant community unsustainable. At the very least, autovoting needs to be strongly deincentivized.

I don't have the answers but this is the debate we should be having if steemit is anything more than a tool for investment and money making game.

Just thought I'd put this out there, again.

BTW thanks for your service, I used it to buy my very first $20 usd worth of Bitcoin, I know I'm a bit late. I'd like to turn it into a million and reinvest half in steem power if we can get our collective shit together. :-P