I don't understand why investors always talk about their ROI (here in this special case "curation return")?
Could it be because they are investors?
Their main aim should be to increase the value of STEEM. Voting for 'quality content' (and flagging bid bot supported posts) would be a contribution to a higher value ... (with or without much curation reward).
That would be like working hard for a whole day and sharing the pay with thousands of other people...
You can't expect most people sacrifice their time and effort mostly for the benefit of others like that. The fact that it is fruitless to expect that caused socialism to fall.
The problem here is misaligned incentives.
If you have one million STEEM it's not most important to get even more STEEM, it's important to increase the value of these STEEM you already own.
I don't think PoB can even theoretically work very well except in communities where most of the stake is controlled by a single app that rewards content creators strictly according to quality. Under that scenario, the main stakeholder has enough power and an incentive to curb abuse and reward commensurately to value created.
Steem with its fast block processing time and free transactions is well suited to serve as the base layer powering an archipelago of such token economies. EIP+WP is a step toward Steem becoming a non-PoB base layer and that's a good thing. Those things will help Steem limp onwards, hopefully for a few years more, to spread stake further before content rewards can be discontinued for good.
Unfortunately, Steemit, Inc still controls too large a stake for Steem to be sufficiently decentralized to be secure against external threats. As long as a form of PoB is practiced with STEEM, SBD and Vests, it would be in the best interests of Steemit, Inc as the largest stakeholder to help the community fight abusive maximisers and non-economic abusers who harass community members for their personal gratification. That would also help. Doing it correctly is easier said than done but it's an issue that should be on the table.
I would prefer to share a huge cake with others instead to have a very small cake for myself alone.
Again, if their behaviour contributed to a higher STEEM price, and if they have a lot of STEEM, I couldn't see a sacrifice at all.
As I said, I consider myself as investor, as well, I have earned quite some STEEM within the last one and a half year ... and the value of my account has decreased a lot at the same time: the size of the cake matters, not one's percentage of the cake.
I plead for a committee of elected users with some delegated Steem power from Steemit, Inc., which could decide which stuff to flag and also (in case someone complains) if flags are justified or not, and if "yes" just counter them with upvotes.
In addition, accounts who repeatedly misuse flags in an abusive way (instead using them against spam, plagiarism etc.) could be flagged, as well, after a decision of that committee.