I like this. It goes very well with the development of the communities. But how is this different from delegations? I would say not much, somehow.

Crucial difference. Currently, whales dominates the reward pool. After something like that, reputed curators and community leaders such as yourself will dominate the reward pool. Doesn't matter if you have a million SP or 1000 SP, at the end of the day your voting influence is based upon how good a curator the Steem community thinks you are.

Of course, this is prone to abuse and circlejerk too, but at least it makes some sense and reflects the public, rather than just some nonsense algorithm currently that assumes "the richer you are, the better curator you are".

However, one may need a pool of people (manually) checking the behavior of the curators in order to prevent from abuses at this level.

I agree, and I suggested this in the next sentence - a judiciary system to stamp out abuse. Steemians can vote for people to be elected as judges etc.

Besides that, the community can choose to unvote their curators, just like they do with witnesses now.

Note - all of the above are simply my vague suggestions, and I don't expect Steem to actually adopt any of it. I'll be interested to see their solution though.