I often don't vote for good content as it has already been autovoted blindly and would rather share my small vote with the users struggling to earn a dollar per post. The curation rewards have never bothered me as I just see them as a bonus. For me the encouragement and retention is far more important in the long run and that will only happen with support from bigger accounts down to the smaller ones. There is no point in just voting sideways all the time as that will just consolidate the hive within a few accounts instead of a solid distribution system down through the ranks to further decentralize the platform eco-system.
I do find some of your thoughts very interesting especially on
If I had more time I would experiment with a front end / community thing with ads where the money is used to buy hive and then distributed to the authors depending on how many pageviews they have, that way at worst they sell and you have equal buy/sell pressure at best they power it up and keep it which just means more buy pressure.
As I had recently tried to bring up the subject.
While in the long run different apps, smt's and resource credits can add value to the system and drive the demand and price of hive. Imo that is still a long way off. Until then we need to add value to the token instead of just taking it away. BAT do this very well. Leofinance have started token buybacks and with the amount of content we create here we should be monetizing that data and putting the value back into the system. Unfortunately if we have a token where the value only flows outwards then the price will only go downwards. Its a self fulfilling prophecy as a low token price wont attract users or devs. A high token price will bring in both to work on the chain and add more value.
In these cases I often ask the author to write an additonal comment which I can then upvote to support him without increasing the curation rewards of the auto voters.