I hear you, and I am skeptical about it too, but I'd rather try that than continue like this. We need something that will change the behaviour of vote-sellers and "auto"-curators. We need something that makes the curators go out there and manually curate.
50/50 seems like something that actually would have an impact on that. At least from my understanding so far.
I curate manually and I really enjoy doing it with Partiko because is convenient, easy, and fast. One of thing I hate the most is the curation trails that kill the magic of curation, and most of them don't read the posts...