The system allows people to be either professional/strategic curators (trying to predict what others will like) or consumer/revealing curators. The former are doing it to make money. The latter are doing it in order to "buy" more of what they like by revealing preferences and adjusting incentives for both content creators and professional curators. Regardless of which role you choose to play (and it needn't be entirely one or the other), there is value to reading (or at least skimming/reviewing) content. That is only my view, though, you may reasonably disagree.

It is clear though, that relatively late curators do not make significant (if any) money from curation rewards, and according to the system design should either be consumer curators or not vote at all. Whether people actually behave in that manner I can't say for sure, but to the extent they don't, the system design is not at fault.