I do agree, it's mainly a curation issue. What remains is the problem that the voting power is directly connected to the steem a user has, which means that whales have some 95% of all voting power. You can see that nicely in the charts of the daily statistics. For the moment this has the consequence that it is almost impossible to push good content even if it's 20+ small users who upvote something. You have to be a whale (or you need a good bot). This tightens the bottleneck extremely much.
Maybe a solution could be to use a bot to multiply an upvote. Some of them are cheap.
But without voting power binding, what's the point of Steem Power?
If I couldn't make impactful votes on Steem by my SP, I'd surely leave. That way, it'd mean nothing for me.
Holy shit that article is amazing, thanks for showing!
Your idea isn't bad, either - being difficult to reach the top would make the community healthier.
Have you tried discussing it with the developers?