While it does what you describe, at the same time it empowers big abusers as high power circles and self voting whales - of which we still have quite a few who nobody takes care of. On the backs of the majority of small and new creators.
As I said before, cent vote farms should be approached by blockchain analysis, not with an approach that hurts honest cent voters.
About SMT replacing the steem pool I have no strong opinion, I can see positives, but your remarks have some validity too. I don't see external exchange listings as too critical because of the option to convert internally and use steem for on-/offramping, and the demand for a bandwidth token can not be evaluated before SMT are live. But I certainly agree that it should not be a short term priority, we need to see how SMT are accepted first.
Regarding the stablecoin I disagree. But I also still value my holdings in BTC instead of fiat, and want crypto to replace it ;)
I don't see the curve empowering big abusers and self-voting whales, they already have high power regardless. Any effect of the curve on them is negligible (few percent maybe).
The positives and negatives on small accounts and small votes are more debatable but this doesn't seem to be a large stake circle/whale issue at all.
I did a round of tests, and the results for when the threshold is reached are indeed lower than my subjective impression so far. A few percent of a high vote still translate in quite a lot of small votes, and when they had higher values the bigger ones would go down some more than the curve effect boosts them right now. It's still just a few percent, but that doesn't invalidate that it's on the back of the small ones.
My focus certainly is on the lower end, where it has the big impact.