Here's a platform where most people vote 20% to author and 80% to keep (curation) from a rewards pool and the only number ever displayed goes directly to the author... no inflated number that gets chopped up later. The way it works in that case is that all votes impact a shared reward pool and each vote is worth a set value. What that would look like on STEEM is another question entirely, but I imagine with scotbot it's something that some community will explore in the future.

To address the concern of their being no content creators left though, from the site I linked you can see that clearly isn't true. Would I spend all the time required to write those quality of posts for a couple of bucks? Probably not, but it isn't stopping other people from doing it. Just because you or I don't think 20% would be worthwhile doesn't mean that would stop it from being successful. Perhaps if that dynamic played out, we'd just be voting/curating and let other people that enjoy and make better content be the creators while we get paid for voting.

The only thing we can tell with all certainty at this point is that what we're doing doesn't work. Continuing to do the same thing is insane at this point. I think trying something else is the only option if we aren't just milking this dead cow for as long as we can.