What is wrong with: Your own vote is worth 1$, 50cents goes to the author, 50% to you? You just get what your vote is worth. It gives a clear indication of your earnings without taking guessing in the equation.

To accomplish this, I think that you'd have to eliminate the reward for early voters and also the super-linear rewards curve. With a super-linear rewards curve, my vote on a $100 post is worth more than the same vote on a $1 post. If you eliminate the early voting incentive but leave the super-linear curve, everyone will just vote for the posts at the top of the trending page.

The problem with removing both is that if you do this, the voter doesn't care what post they vote on. They get the same reward if they vote for a great post or if they vote for the first thing they see. And so, we wind up with a blockchain full of (even more) self-voted SPAM. We saw it already with the linear rewards curve. People will just make 10 vacuous posts per day, vote for those, and collect both author and curation rewards from their votes. If the community responds by downvoting self-votes, then people will just hide behind alt accounts.

The reward for early voting encourages voters to vote for posts that were written by other people - instead of just self voting - because high payouts are possible if the voter correctly guesses the posts that will get additional votes. And this is the one incentive that we do see working as designed.

I agree that abuse is subjective. Some things are clearly abusive, others are more ambiguous. If we, eventually, construct the right incentive system, it shouldn't matter. The goal is to find incentives that will drive curators to appraise and reward all posts according to their relative perceived value. By reverting to content-indifferent voting, I think that removing the early voting reward would drive things in the opposite direction.

I agree with your other comment that Steem's fall from #3 in market cap to #130 is far more severe than the general bear market in cryptocurrency, and I also agree with you that the curation rewards distribution needs to be revisited, so thank you for initiating the discussion.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if there are any developers available to Steemit or the witnesses to make blockchain level changes at the moment, so it may be a purely hypothetical conversation for some time to come.