Why would you ever power up if you are not a well earning author?
Why would a well earning Author Power Up? The Authors reward is not based at all on how much Hive Power they hold.
it would be nice to see two more Hard Forks that did not involve changing/chasing the reward pool/vote system.
If your posts regularly earn 10 HIVE rewards by upvoting from others, and you have powered up 500k HIVE, you can more than double your 10 HIVE rewards, to 24 HIVE rewards each, pushing it over the edge regarding the curation curve.
That's why you power up as an already successful author. Because you can greatly improve your author rewards with self upvoting.
I have not powered down, but I can see the self vote as a big reward boost. Some do it some do't, it is still an option. With no curation rewards, of what value is the vote other than for self voting.
People don't need to vote on a post to read and enjoy it. I myself vote on post because I like it and would like to see more of that type content. I also vote on people because they have content I have enjoyed in the past and my mood taste have changed for a bit, but I know I will be back into that subject again.
A change to the vote system may be needed, I don't know. One solution via code may be an expansion of the dust level vote system. So it by levels, example:
Any vote from an account of less than 500 HP at less than 75% vote power is auto dust, so those accounts would need to vote with a percentage of at least 76$ giving them about 23 votes a day.
Any vote from an account between 500-2500 would use 50% as the dust cut-off
Any vote from an account between 2500-5000 would use 25%
Any vote from account 5000-50000 15%
Any vote from account 50,000-500,000 8%, and any account over 500,000 5%.
Those were just arbitrary percentages and levels. I am sure something resembling fair could be worked out, with out doing away with the curation rewards.