Yes, absolutely. Each of those factors just exacerbates this perfect storm.
I understand the plan with HF20 is to return the lost curation rewards to the pool, rather than the author, which will certainly help.
A return to US$1 SBD would be great too, or as you say, the choice to be paid curation rewards with that split (doing so would really flood the market with SBD and may bring it back to the peg anyway).
I'd support either 50/50 author/curator split OR quadratic rewards. (I'd personally prefer both, but either is much better than neither)