Exactly right. The problem isn't the percentage of rewards going to the author. The problem is terrible curating results largely due to bots and trying to pile on whale trends. Actual writers pretty much avoid this place. We see the mediocre and relatively awful content atop the trending page on a daily basis, but those who keep putting it there don't care...because it's not about quality. For most of the voters, it's only about gaming and getting paid.
Changing the rewards to give more money to bots and gamers won't resolve any issues related to bringing in quality creators and bringing up the value of the site based on the content.
There doesn't seem to be much incentive for good writers to be here and lowering payouts to writers won't improve that. It seems to me that we can have either really good content or really good curation gaming, but not both.