Congrats on becoming a 10k dolphin!!
Whatever changes you're thinking off, i hope it doesn't include changing the author / curation split. That will have a massive impact for authors and reduce the incentive for them to produce quality content.
It takes me sometimes a good few days to write my travel posts and sort and edit photos, to get a $7 orgainic post payout. It won't be worth my effort if the author payout reduces so if that happens we can kiss goodbye to little quality content authors that still exist and say hello to more shit posts. 😞
I feel you and it's hard to feel like we're going to 'lose' something - but we can gain from it too :-) 10 STEEM at 1$ or 1 STEEM at 10 dollar... It might just be that the changes are not really going to make so much of a difference.
Also, 7$ is never how I look at my payout. That's just stupid to keep on displaying Dollar payouts on for example steemit.com. Those 7$ are 15-20 STEEM which is huge, and if STEEM only went to ATH that means a huge payout for a post - you can't earn that at a 'real' paper magazine :-)
Anyway, not saying I know which way to go that is best, just trying to see as many perspectives as possible :-) If people start shit posting with lower payouts that's their problem, it might just be that some of the 'bidbot whales' start curating again and they won't upvote those shitpost?