Brutal nesting!
Yes, I'm sorry about my irrational choices of where to respond :(
People shouldn't have to change their blogging habits to accommodate a rewards system. These photographers spent hours taking and processing photos. I produce digital art and I often do include some sort of story to go along with the art, but not always.
Simple solution: make the time limit 10 seconds. It should never take less than 10 seconds to look at a photo, especially one that we enjoy to look at, and if it does we only have to suffer mere seconds to put in our 100% vote.
What does this accomplish?
First of all, manual curators are now forced to at least BE where they are voting -- as in, actually looking at the content that they're voting on (no votes without views -- another problem many people have been mentioning). Can you "thumbs-up" a youtube video without opening its link? As far as I can tell, the answer is no, and I think Steemit would benefit by setting up a similar condition to voting for content.
Secondly, bots will be forced into more difficult prioritizing habits, assuming they can cheat the system into detecting an account as viewing a post (this might be a problem if the bot owner also wants to be viewing content on his/her own), they can't lead vote on a post simultaneously with lead voting another post as they can only be accumulating viewing time on one post at a time.