The curation trails were present before the HardFork 21 (HF21). I even used some in the past, but nowadays I am not using any curation trails, but maybe I will use some, because I don't always have time for the Steem blockchain to manually curate, and I don't want to waste my voting power.
But maybe you are still right in some level. The problem is the selfishness and the greed of the users. The developers can implement any HardFork they want, if the people will not change their behavior on the Steem, then that will not make more active users, will not attract investors, and the price of the Steem will not increase.
The time will tell whether the new Steem experiment is a fail or not.