I don't agree, and I think the white paper makes a similar point. Voting or rating as a process is extremely valuable and much of the value associated with content is finding it, organizing it, and promoting it. Many of the high (10+ million or maybe 100+ million) view videos on youtube are valuable precisely because they are extremely popular, not because the content of that video happens to be so enormously different or better than many other videos.
There is also a game theory effect here. If you are the post's author, how much of your reward are willing to share with voters in order to encourage them to vote for you? If posts could specify the split between post reward and voter rewards, which split do you think would drive maximum earnings for the post? I think the correct answer is probably 50%.
It's valuable for sure, but not equal in value to content. If it was a variable setting made by the original post's author, and without cap, I believe it would be a race to the bottom, and curators would end up taking much more than 50%. Luckily we have network rules that can set it at a point that is fair enough for all. I have to disagree that the value of curation is equal to the value of creation.
Do you disagree that if authors could set (say choosing with a menu) the share of rewards that go to voters, the optimal setting to maximize the amount of net rewards going to the author would be around 50%?
I'm not even positive this is correct, but I think it may be. Remember, voters are many. If a million people vote for a post then each voter's individual contribution is worth 1/1000000 of the author's. That doesn't seem crazy to me.
I think if curation reward was a variable set by the poster it could easily turn into a game of most users not upvoting a post if it didn't fit the average poster/curator reward ratio, which I think would go below 50% and keep falling over time. It would reach some equilibrium at some point but I think the voters would have the upper hand. In the long term, creators would give up and stop contributing. Giving the power to non-creative users doesn't generally end up well for socially-driven websites.