Take a look at @valued-customer's response about increasing rewards to get people to curate more. Do we simply want curation to earn more and profit, or curation to evaluate and qualify cotnent as being better than others?
The fact is that given the blatant incentive to extract rent via selfvotes etc., there is very little incentive to invest as capital gains are unlikely to result from Steem as long as potential investors observe the rampant profiteering ongoing. Curation rewards aren't actually incentive to curate at all, but merely increase the ROI that can be achieved by profiteering. Very few people receive much in the way of curation rewards, and simply ignore them when they upvote for other rewards (social metrics other than financial, which are actually far more valuable than money). Only by ignoring content quality and maximizing mere financial concerns can curation rewards be a substantial incentive to upvote content, and doing that completely obviates the purpose of curation, which is to prefer quality content over lesser product.
Curation rewards are directly counterproductive as presently effected, and simply increasing them only exacerbates that problem - but rentiers want to make the problem worse, because that's their business model.
The word "curation" has been purposefully obfuscated so that it actually means two different things. Wish we would stop abusing it.
Curation as "agnostic upvote" is not the same as Curation as "selective upvote". Whatever the white paper says, it isn't gospel.
The mathematical structure of the curation rewards and especially during the now 15-minute revers auction is interesting in itself and, I think, would have some merit being extended in some ways to the whole voting period. (An aside)
That mathematical structure means that income-generating quality-independent upvotes will always - always - make more money than selective upvotes for the simple reason that it takes time to do the latter - time longer than 0.2 minutes from posting.
So... increasing the curation rewards percentage will just increase the curation-game as income generator even further. I'd love it! It's easy money! But... it will not be good for the economy - at all.
As an afterthought, I think manual curators need to play the same curation-rewards game and thereby increase their own income and those of their favourite bloggers. It's easy now to optimise voting; if you have a batch of bloggers you like just auto-upvote them. Then add manual upvotes to either new authors or top-up your followed authors with comment-upvotes.
The more time-intensive manual curation work does not have to be less rewarding! Honestly.
Glad you also have the eyes to see it won't help actuall ymak curaiton better for the platofrnm. It will only be about making more money in the end, which is clear when money is what's being increased... more curators who don't care about content... wonderful solution for Steem. As long as "investors" get more... :/
Curation will be the new mining on Steem.
I find the mathematics and game theory interesting, which is also why I don't want to see the game go down the drain.