The idea of increasing curation rewards dramatically seems like a no-brainer to me. There is no shortage of content on the STEEM network, but there is certainly a shortage of labor to sort through it all and find something worth reading. Manual curation should be very highly rewarded.

I also like the Schools of Thought idea. Using the linked blog format is a great way to connect teacher, student, and peer together. It would be great if the STEEM network could be used to confirm identities, establish reputation, and organize teamwork. Those are some of the primary functions of the formal education system - I think that the STEEM network could be used to do the same thing. Instead of having a diploma, a resume, and a LinkedIn account, you would have a complete professional identity on the blockchain. Ideally it would be encrypted and you could grant limited access to your information to trusted people.

I'm not sure about your witness voting idea. The result of shifting witness voting power out of the hands of the whales and into the hands of the plankton is difficult to predict. I don't see any reason to think it would be an improvement.

There seems to be something wrong with the way that the witness voting process works, in my opinion. The witnesses are trying to maintain an online persona, engage their followers, etcetera, but that doesn't really have anything to do with technical aspects of running a server. I would prefer to have witnesses who run servers, call them "technical witnesses", earn their rewards for making the network run faster and more reliably - FULL STOP. I don't know how to do that, but I think it is the right way to go.

Setting price feeds, promoting Steemit, making a market for STEEM/SBD, developing new dapps, proposing changes to the code base, are all more social aspects of the witness job that should be separate from the server operation. I'm leaning toward two different kinds of witnesses, one technical and one social.

My first instinct is to start creating the "social witness" concept around a combination of manual curation tasks, mentoring tasks, and social organization tasks. Imagine that @meno the "social witness" earns his rewards for creating an organization like @helpie plus @curie that serves as a way to improve manual curation, provide mentorship, and creates an autonomous social network. Maybe it would evolve into something you would call a School of Thought and I think that it should be rewarded at the witness level.