This phenomenon is totally in sync with the incentives provided by steemit.
People almost always react most strongly to incentives and try to game the system for maximum profit.
This happens in nearly all systems (schools, companies, etc.).
The current curation-reward system absolutely encourages auto-upvotes, upvote-snipers, upvote-trailing etc.
If this behavior is unacceptable for the steemit community, imho the only way is to change the curation-reward system (with a lot of prior thinking as to what behavior the new system could incentivise)...
just my 2 cents
Change the curation system how? It has been suggested to remove it, but the large holders didn't like that since that's how they make more SP.
I don't know how, didn't think about it yet, but the way it is built currently it is a magnet for gaming the system, don't you think? And that's why it's totally understandable that large holders do not wanna change it, because as you said "that's how they make more SP"