As to your first point, that's fair. There is mostly crap floating to the top of the bowl.
I've always felt an upvote should max at $1 or $2. Does it really need to be more than that? If you have more voting power, then you can cast more votes and get more curation that way.
Also, I'd get rid of this 23.13% upvote nonsense. If you want to upvote something, go all in, and upvote it 100%. if you want to get rid of bots, this is the way to go. (Not that I'm necessarily against using bots, but this seems the logical route to go, as it seems to me.)
If the upvote had a max value then I would agree with getting rid of the percentage slider. Then people with more steem power would just have more votes. However, without doing that, reducing the percent of your vote is the only way to get more votes and have them count for anything (at least for those of us that have sub $1 votes anyway). As it is, I usually vote at about 33%.