My ideal is that people would upvote what they like without concern for the financial side. This would get rid of the mentality of trying to pick a "winning horse" before anyone else does. Original posts and comments receive payouts proportional to the number of votes, and still proportional to the size of the account. People will still give value representative of their investment in the site overall, but original posters would receive 100% of the profits, instead of the 75%/25% split.
Incentivizing curation may have been necessary in Steemit's infancy, but we have over 45,000 weekly active users now. (According to @penguinpablo - "Weekly Steem Stats Report - July 31, 2017"). We may not have the numbers of Facebook or Reddit, but we definitely have interest. I don't think people need as much financial incentive to curate - it will happen regardless.
I think it's exactly the opposite which is true. Now more than ever people should be incentivized to curate. It will be harder and harder, as the number of users and posts grow, to actually find good quality content.
Now, how the curation process is done, that's a completely different thing.