The entire curation experience will always rely on one's subjective opinion. If it's at least honest, I'm happy.
I don't think the problem of bad taste is anywhere near as bad as content indifferent voting. Suppose you have 100 people effectively doing the curating platform wide. Chances are the overall result would be far better than if the system just sold votes to the highest bidder (or in some failed case here, pay the highest bidder the most to promote). Of course there a chance that 70 of the 100 curators are all nut jobs with terrible taste, but the probability of that is next to nothing. And it would probably take that many nut jobs to end up with something as bad as when bid botting completely dominates trending.
I guess if it makes you feel any better, it's much hard curating competitively if you have a lot of SP under management than if you only had a smaller stake. In other words, you can likely do better if you curated yourself strategically than if you handed your SP to a team and paid a fee. Also, as more curation projects pop up, competition over fees and performance will play a part too. There are a lot of factors that can improve the curation process over time platform wide.
I don't think it's really feasible to ask passive investors to settle for next to nothing and not allow them to delegate to curation projects. Remember, they were getting almost 100% of voting rewards delegating to bid bots (before free downvotes were a thing). Now they're getting a lot less.
Overall, even if you truly believed that concentrated stake curation is just a terrible as vote selling (which doesn't make much sense), at least now they're only getting 50% of the voting rewards rather than splitting 100% of the voting rewards between the delegator, bid bot owner and vote buyer. So overall, purely economically, it's a big win.
Of course these days bid bot returns shouldn't expect to be seeing high returns any more, with the threat of downvotes.
I don't want to see false prophets. But that is all I'm seeing. You can't pick and choose which aspects of proof of brain suit the platform for you and which that don't. If we are to work honestly with the system as designed, then we must stick to proof of brain in all its purpose which include socialising the allocation of rewards, providing incentive for honest authors to have the best edge of getting organically discovered by as many stake holders as possible.
Rent seeking delegators don't care about the cause, only the largest acceptable return that society deems morally sound. Right now, it seems like a huge loss compared to the 100% (or close to) return they enjoyed before, but it is still far too high for basically doing nothing. And as long as there is over allocation of resources to that endeavour, there will be (as we have here) people quick to gobble up that "opportunity".
The problem at the end of the day is that morally culpable or not, the end result is still that it undermines proof of brain which is what you advocated so strongly and now I advocate so strongly.
You can't force stakeholders to personally cast each vote at the individual level.
But we would much prefer it if their stake is used for honest voting rather than vote selling.
And that's exactly what we're getting now with OCDB.
All that stake that use to be used for content indifferent vote selling is now being used to pass value to content creators according to the subjective appraisal of their content.
They use to do a lot of damage, now they're doing a lot of good. It's a huge win for the platform.
This
Curation projects are, to me, inevitable anyway. Humans have a natural tendency to centralize. Historically; family -->tribe-->village -->city -->nation --> blocs of nations (the EU) and people now speak of world governments.
Internet did the same thing, where the vast majority of internet use is centralised around a few company's apps.
Simply put - because it's easier. I see curation groups as representatives for people who support that given cause. Much like an MP or something.
Whether or not you think this is a positive or negative thing, it's gonna happen regardless
Nobody disagree with that, But nobody goes clamoring when when a new vote seller is born.
This is centralization.