I feel like this is also connected to scalability. Being one of the curators I find it extremely difficult to curate these days because there is too much content. That way I changed to focus on virtual curation by early supporting posts with money. Whales being good or bad make the 90% curation of content anyways also the popularity of certain users does the same. I feel scaling down author rewards, curation rewards, and influence where it would mean one user for example 10 cents for upvoting and 1 cent for curation or something like that would be fair and could settle things down. Then payout for curation may be multiplied by someone's vests and created steem divided. This might help thing out.