I am but a minnow who can't afford to buy steem. I am not incentivised to curate for profit because as a minnow there is barely a profit. And that's how it should be for a minnow.

But for those who have steem, such as the dolphins, the end of curation rewards I believe would be the end of steemit. And without the dolphins steemit isn't very promising for the minnows either.

There has to be another solution and thank you @dantheman for putting the issues here for everybody to brainstorm on.

There may be holes in my suggestion as I know that @steemit holds the majority stake of steemit.
But I'll throw it here just in case you haven't thought of it yet.
First of all I think the proposal you made in your last post about proxy vests for friends is going to massively improve the platform building lots of dolphins who can help with future bad behaviour.

Currently the more SP you have the more you accumulate from curating content. You say that per account caps will result in sybil attacks and since I'm not very techy maybe my suggestion doesn't get passed that either.

What if curators with higher SP could get higher curation rewards only up to a point? Such as a 3% stake of all steem or even 1% once this is further distributed

Would this prevent a 'whale-gone-rogue' from overcoming others as to remain vote-active on the platform they would have to remain below whatever SP that % is at at any given time?