I agree that there's an awful lot pf junky posts around here. Your conclusion is, indeed, correct. If you propose to pay people to post, that's exactly what you'll get. For better, or worse.
Keep in mind, however, that curation and commenting can be equally as shallow. So many two word comments (Nice post!) or straight out 'upvote me' begs that reading through the threads can be just as painful as searching through the feed.
With that said, I do think that curation is undervalued. I'm not sure its a 50/50 proposition, but 65/35 has a good ring to it. Folks should feel incentivized to reward good content, and to participate by upvoting and commenting by getting a larger slice of the pie.
Perhaps it would be helpful to have a couple of Silver Bullet downvotes we could use to punish spammers, scammers, and slammers. A separate pool of Steem to help keep the floors swept...