I believe in observing the ecology to determine what's going on in it and what those who participate in it want and need.
Given that the vast bulk of the people operating on the blockchain are engaged in curation manipulation in order to acquire reward, then I think it's safe to say – judging by the rules that Steem, Inc. have laid forth, people really do need curational awards that much. They want them. They want to engage with them.
Just not personally. They have no interest in actually playing the curation minigame themselves. It's far more rewarding to build bots who engage in playing the curation minigame algorithmically.
You get what you reward.
I cannot imagine a number of sets of rules which will not advantage automation significantly, but all of them ultimately hinge on making a change in basic assumptions about what STEEM means in the blockchain.
At this point, the basic commodity itself exists purely as an authoritarian, top-down assessment of your value to either create or successfully bet on pseudo-viral content. Not content which is good or reportable to a community, but content which other people will judge to be sufficiently viral.
And that's really all it means. If people like myself who are creators but who don't particularly make things which are likely to be runaway popular get rewarded, that's a pleasant accident. It means that some people probably lost their bet on me and my work.
Worse, it means that if they did vote my stuff up with the intention of me being rewarded for providing them something that they liked – the mechanics of the game say that they're playing it wrong. That's not how to get maximum reward out of the system.
From my perspective, that's very sad.
Maybe I spend a lot more time thinking about how to create sets of rules that people want to play with, but it certainly not incomprehensible to me that a set of mechanics could be put together which incentivizes an individual engaging with the platform in ways that rewards them with things other than bigger numbers that they want. To do that, it takes an effort to understand what else they might want.
The current population of Steemit? Most of them just want bigger numbers. And that's all.
It's no great mystery.
It is quite sad.