Completely agree, curation rewards rewards bot voting much more than actual curation, making curation what it is right now: 10:1 ratio in some cases of votes to views. That alone is disparaging to any new user when they are obviously confronted with the fact that "people" vote for content that they haven't even read, and the other aspect that @beanz was arguing is that clearly it makes everyone compete with machines, and following that to the conclusion is that to compete with a machine you have to employ a machine. Remove curation rewards as people have incentive to vote and reward authors and it removes incentive to vote for rewards. Voting/curating is a fine endeavor but not necessarily worthy of any rewards, the rewards come intrinsically not extrinsically from allocating whatever portion your vote can from the reward pool.