As always, you make some excellent points and I'll freely admit that I have my doubts about finding a solid working solution with the dynamic we have in place. One of the more interesting models I've seen lately is Publish0x... They don't actually make much, but projects basically give them tokens to act as a reward pool for the attention economy and they allow people to create content or curate. Curators can pick a sliding scale 20-80% give/keep. Obviously most curators give 20% and keep the 80... but it works similar to what you're saying about having a fixed reward pool, just with rewarding the consumers as well. Looking at the quality of the content they have on there and the rewards the authors are earning makes me realize we have something seriously wrong in our approach on STEEM if people are willing to write content of the quality I have seen there for so much less monetary reward. Great food for thought. Thanks for swinging by dude.