Your framework borrowed from statistics is interesting, and thanks for your example. But please take my point: the issue is mixture of motivation. If you want to upvote every post in fiction tag, that's not because you want to maximize your curation reward but because you have some satisfaction from doing that.
the bandwagon voters don't actually influence rewards distribution anyway
@sigmajin's post is interesting too. But if no curation reward exist, the $160 might go to other posts by for-content curators. So they already meaningfully influence reward distribution, as well as voting counts.
The problems I perceive are, our filtration system for good contents are distorted by hybrid motivation. At least 500 bots (clues from votes on @steemvoter's posts. Maybe less but still hundreds I think) are round and casting votes for "profit", not for "quality of contents".