Majority of the people who vote for me, whether it's automated or manually, enjoy my work. I did something right to get their attention. Now they can't wait to see what I'll do next. I appreciate their efforts. They come to my comment section and we all have a blast. It's a nice yard with a lot of shade. Why do you want to come to my yard and make it ugly? I enjoy giving back to these people.
If there is a specific manner that allows people to vote in a fashion that doesn't seem like it's good for business, make adjustments. If I have a leaky roof, I'll fix it. Replacing a leaky roof before testing to see if it can be fixed is counterproductive.
You keep saying there is specific problem, and I can agree. So why not address that issue? You can see it, you know what it is. If you can pinpoint the problem, a solution shouldn't be too far away.
If incentives don't work, why are saying people are voting in a certain way because there is an incentive to do so. Why not change what is so appealing into something else which is also appealing, while learning from the mistakes in the past...
This is my quote
I am not trying to replace the roof, else I wouldn't have asked you how to repair it...
I've thought about improving curation reward but it's very difficult to incentivize people to vote for what they like instead of what the post will earn.
I don't really see how to improve the current curation rewards system because it is already very good at what its doing and every abuse problem has been thought out, but it is still a burden because the incentives are bad.
At this point the best would just be to give a fixed curation rewards to active voters ( say 30+ vote per day) in proportion to their steem power.
EDIT : Actually even a fixed reward is stupid as it would incentivize bots to vote which means a lot of the stake will be used by bots.
What we want like @timcliff said is a system where real active users are rewarded by having a bigger influence. ( since no more bots will be voting)