I agree that making alternate rule-sets available in test networks is needed - although history has shown that Steem's complexity can result in these test scenarios having difficulty generating realistic data, but it's still better than nothing.
I agree that effecting the way that voting benefits people such that dysfunctional voting is reduced would be a great thing - however, despite a huge amount of communication and thinking on this issue over the years, I haven't really seen any examples of how this can be done reliably and in a balanced way. In the absence of any workable solutions, I look instead at what is workable and hence I look at preventing the function of bidbots.
Curation, as interesting an idea as it is - doesn't actually stop the bidbot corruption of proof of brain because, for one, the curation rewards just go to the upvoter - which might be a bidbot - which still helps the bidbot operator to offer lower priced votes to customers. Higher curation rewards don't necessarily hurt bidbot operators.