By now we tried various methods in the distribution of HIVE. But nothing seems to work properly IMHO. While you pointed out some forms of self-voting that emerged in which the self-vote itself is kinda hidden, I see quite a few users simply self-voting themselves. Some even get great rewards, from not only auto voters but also manual voters, including sometimes even votes from curator teams. Personally, when I vote with curator team powers, I like to vote for a user that makes nice contributions to HIVE-based blogging/engaging. Engagement is almost a must. I rarely vote for users that create GREAT posts but do not engage, or only drop some thank you comments, or rarely engage outside their own posts.

Like you, I don't know what a great curation should look like since I just try my best. However, what I think we can learn from the last 7 years is that money distribution based on distributed voting like we have here at HIVE, results in tons of money being distributed in ways it is not helping the service itself. Something that we need to address, again. However, we need to be rigorous in the next iteration. Perhaps we need to force all users that aren't active to hand over their vote powers to those that are actively trying to grant their votes to posts and users that deserve such a vote.

Most recently I noticed an old-time user writing his goodbye to the HIVE community in a nice way after receiving a few downvotes on his nicely rewarded posts. Some become angry, so I have to give it to this user; That he didn't get angry. However, those downvotes are quite deserved because the effort going into all his recent year(s) posts is next to nothing, whilst no engagement (hardly any) while receiving 10 to 20$ post rewards due to auto voters and such. This is just one example. Daily I come across such not wanted situations. Although I also found my ways not to come across many of such 'abusive' behaviours, since seeing too many of such, takes some of my positivity away ;)