Great insight @calamus056, I definitely agree with you that the 7 day window for earnings on content encourages overall lower quality content. Do you think a diminishing return over time would be better than a hard stop at 7 days?
I have also thought about the prospect of a handful of power users manipulating the network, content and proceeds to benefit each other. This absolutely needs fixing before mass adoption. Reminds me of Digg way back in the day and the influence that power users had over whether content makes it to the home page or not.
There needs to be other ways for content to pass a quality filter on top of curation.