"Are you suggesting that curation rewards shouldn't depend on the the size of the voting stake used?"
Absolutely! Just imagine if our political voting systems were based on how much money voters had! That would mean that less than 1% of the world would be able to dictate how the remaining 99% plus lived, and that 99% plus would have absolutely no say in the matter. No thanks!
"How much do they get paid on Facebook for liking posts again?"
Facebook members do not have to pay in order to be allowed to like posts. Besides, the vast majority of Steemit members can make just as much money on Facebook....yes, nothing!
Steemit is a quickly dying platform for this, and many other reasons.
Steem is not a country.
Besides, why would anyone ever want to power up if they weren't allowed to earn curation rewards? To self vote? How do you think that would motivate any stakeholder to curate?
You don't have to own any more Steem Power than what Steemit, Inc delegates to you for free when you have an account created for you to upvote a post.
Complete rubbish. Anyone can make money on their content on Steem and the threshold for that is MUCH LOWER than on Facebook. Not everyone automatically does. Steem is not a welfare provider. You can't help but spend time networking and providing quality content and that's the way it should be.
Certainly not for the reasons you are proposing.
Steem is a tiny platform in comparison to most other social media platforms. Yet, it has delivered $100 million dollars worth of author rewards in the four years or so it has existed. Despite such generosity on part of investors, there are users on it bitching and moaning for more. There are thousands of users on Steem that are making orders of magnitude more than they could on any other platform. If Steem is going to die, it may do so because it being TOO generous.