I agree

It's hard to tell where the economic equilibrium will eventually set but I'll definitely do my part to make curation competitive by making vote selling as unprofitable as possible.

I don't really expect manual curation will compete with automatic curation, but either is far and away superior to a vote selling market which completely undermines POB and is what I believe the only realistic outcome of the previous broken economic system.

Maybe in the future you could turn this into a more general project where multiple curators can sign up and charge whatever rates as they see fit as well as any principles they use 'eg Supporting art, supporting X community, maximizing ROI etc'. Then you can tally it all up and people can order them by their approaches or by proven post fees ROI. On the other side, stakeholders can choose whomever to delegate. If the place starts looking more honest, I imagine some stakeholders won't even be looking to maximize ROI and are somewhat willing to take a small ROI hit to support a voting initiative they believe in specifically.

Anyway this is a great pivot for our entire ecosystem. Let's make honest curation (be it manual or automatic or hybrid) the norm. Ultimately even in pure ROI, with free downvotes floating about bot curation will also have to adapt quickly to manual downvoting habits.