Encouragement:
Possibly the most important factor, like you said, is encouraging more curation by giving them 50% rewards. To some extent, potentially, that decentralizes the curation system. It gets more people involved in curating. That helps curators and it more importantly helps content creators.
Centralized Users
A single account may now only get 50% in rewards, in HF21, which is less than 75%, which we had before.
Mathematical Magic
Yet, ironically, mathematically, curation is like a funnel. The single user is a central point. Instead of increase the smaller end of the funnel (posting rewards), theoretically, expanding the other end of the funnel (curation) has the potential towards expansion. I have my fingers crossed for this new hard fork.
Content Creators
Some might argue that content creators, to some extent, might be like employers. Imagine allowing employers 50% profits. I like that. Some might say that's too much. But before HF21, it was at 75%. So, this might be a step in the right direction. And other people argue that it should remain at 75% or more. I understand their concerns. But mathematically, the curators are like the employees. They upvote the content that is provided by content creators (employers). If you give a thousand curators more money, then they might curate more. And 50% of that goes to the employer. More curation means more votes. And more votes means more money for the central users. So, in theory, this will improve the Steem system. Mathematically, it's easy to understand the funnel system. I hope this second pool, the downvoting system, helps as well.
How are content creators emplyers? We are just as much employees as curators. We work hours at a time and put content on the platform. We don't deserve to be taken for granted and hf21 is basically saying Steemit doesn't care about us. It won't reward the little guy just because we make less than 2p Steem per post.
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I argued against the 50/50 change, but in all honesty, 80% curator 20% content producer would possibly even work better than 50/50. I know it sounds bad but it would sort of be turning curator into a true profession. At 20/80 I could genuinely imagine average joes buying $5000 worth of STEEM and setting up shop as a professional content hunter, almost like being a professional editor, but working for yourself rather than at a publisher. This could turn curators into the much needed gatekeepers for the indie publishing revolution.
Indie publishing is awesome, but it does have a weakness, which is that now we have an over-abundance of content. Now it is difficult for you to find quality content. So, Steem could have the potential for "employing" thousands of indie editors/curators that would support the indie content producer revolution with curation.
Think about it another way, what's a more profitable post? A post that gets 75% of $5 or 20% of $50? The percentage that content producers get is not as important as the amount of authors to curators. I would say that right now we have a massive imbalance in author to curator ratio, with there being more authors than curators. That's a problem, because we needs thousands or hundreds of thousands of curators to each author in order for authors to truly benefit on Steem. That's why I don't think it is problematic for curators to get a larger percentage.
Exactly. Thus why I call content creators like employers in the sense that bosses do better with more staff in some cases at least. It's a funnel. It's a sprinkler.