I love the initial premise. I'm not so sure about the solutions though. In the end there is always this paradox between the ability to self vote and the ability to create multiple accounts, it seems that if you try curb one, the other will be abused. More strict registration where we had to use our IDs and could only create 1 (or a limited amount of) account(s) would solve most of steemits issues, but I really love that we are free to remain relatively anonymous here so I am not pushing for that.

The only other solution I can think of is to basically do as you propose in your general assesment of what should be done. We should be making more of an incentive to spread wealth, by both changing algorithms and the general tone and culture of the platform through our own will to do so.

But you still run into problems with higher curation rewards. People currently curate content based on their perceived ability to profit from it, which means that wealth still floats back to a few people rather than becoming more distributed. Very few people curate with the intention of helping undervalued content get seen or spreading wealth and there is soooo much undervalued content at steemit, despite how much crap content out there.

Problems sometimes take a long time to crop up cause many of our large stakeholders have the platforms longevity and the benefit of others in mind and are generally decent people like yourself. But what happens when a new class of shit curators level up their game to profit from increased curation rewards? I think there are already problems with 25% rewards for curation, they'd likely get much worse by changing that to 50%.

Has anyone talked about voting for curators the way we vote for witnesses and allowing curators to profit that way rather than directly though a percentage of what they curate? It's not a problem of curators making too much money, it's a problem of the method in which they are paid, through a percentage. We could set reward for curation to 0% and allocate 25% (or even 50%) of the reward pool to curators through a voting system similar to witnesses. If large stakeholders didn't want to do curation themselves, they could hire curators to use their stake for them, and they would be judged based on the curators they chose. People would surely vote for acidyo and curie as top curators and they could share some of those rewards as payment to the curators, whatever was agreed upon.

I honestly feel that every whale should be encouraged to have a manual curation team working for them like @acidyo does in order to make the most of their stake and if they don't want to bother with the work, they can just pay others to do it for them. And they should be rewarded handsomely for doing a good job at it and not so much for doing a half assed job or for taking advantage of the system.

What do you think?

EDIT: Turned this into a post, if you like the idea let's spread it
https://steemit.com/steemit/@whatamidoing/why-don-t-we-set-curation-rewards-to-0-and-vote-for-curators-the-way-we-vote-for-witnesses