It is a good discussion to have. Right now I'm not sure what kind of contribution curation rewards make to the system. You need to have a large amount of SP for it to be viable and it only really benefits the top tier users.
As you describe there is also great potential for whale accounts to game the system in order to maximise their rewards by voting since they benefit the most. I certainly think it is worth trialling a removal of curation rewards at least for a short period.
Yeah, it's hard to know what would work best. On the one hand, the devs want to reward valuable activities, like discovering undervalued content, on the other hand, game theory says that the current system will result in flock voting.