Comments are often provide as much, and sometimes more, content than the original post. So I think the devs want to encourage commenting as much as voting.
I'm upvoting every comment in this post to see what happens. If you remember, let me know how much you actually get when the payout comes.
Author reward of 0.049 SD and 0.024 STEEM POWER for fubar-bdhr/re-johnsmith-how-i-increased-my-curation-rewards-by-more-than-1000-and-how-you-can-too-20160805t214939087z
Well that's interesting - the upvote was worth $0.10 and the total rewards add up to about $0.10 but are paid out in a mix of SD and SP. Didn't realize that! Thanks for following up, greatly appreciated!
They need to rethink the voting limits then. The incentive is to vote on the post themselves since they make most of the money. Maybe separate limits for posts and comments.
Yes, would motivate people to comment more if there was an allocation just for posts. Divide total post reward over all posts, so everyone knows they get something for saying something, and then give posts with more votes more of the allocation. Now that I'm upvoting every post I understand why no one does it - I'm using up my voting power with zero benefit to me.