At least from an impression perspective, it seems to be a misaligned incentive. Do we really want the message to users to be that we are encouraging users to not vote?
Yeah, that's a fair point. Even if the rewards for curation would easily be higher than the rewards for sitting, it would easily feel like an incentive not to vote.
Any whale that did still use their voting power (with the absence of most of the other whales voting) would have a huge dominated say in the allocation of rewards, since their vote would be such a large portion of the voting stake.
That's true.
If the rewards for curation are higher everyone would curate.