The comment section on @stellabelle's article is indeed very informative. Maybe the system works fine and it's the users who don't get it but for that it is too early to see.
I agree with you on the two points. Especially the site functionality is poor. I hardly find new interesting users to follow. But maybe that is the idea of the Steem blockchain: Build your own front-end and do it better. But so far - among the coders - only @elear understood that part, which would make it again a matter of time.
In case the mechanism does need some change, I would propose something like a square root solution for curations from a certain threshold onwards. That would change the voting power significantly.