That is a supercool idea.
You have an agile mind, and a heart for service.
So, what can be done to keep, actually to return, curation in the hands of people, rather than bots? Would making votes equal cause bots to decline in utility? Would making VP be unaffected up to ~75 - 100 votes and then rapidly decline discourage bots?
Steemit is about human interaction, and bots curating devalues all our contributions.
While there are plenty of other, even more pressing problems at the moment, such as VP decay (that is savagely curtailing curation), and SP weighting of VP (which is forcing whales to self vote, or vote in cliques), bots curating debases the value of Steemit to people, and this isn't a problem I have been able to even speculate a solution to in my head.
You're smarter than me. What can at least discourage bots from being involved in curation?
I think you're off on a wild tangent here, @whatageek did not make one mention of bots. And as far as I know they are an avid user of bots 😅
Rate limiting of voting power (i.e. after you vote your voting power drops somewhat, what you call VP decay here) is designed to limit the advantage of bots over people, and indeed of people who can afford to sit around all day up voting content. This is even more effective since hard fork 19.
I don't think there's a way to discourage (or rather disincentivize) bots which would not make human curation meaningless.