Their accounts also distribute the reward pool to a lot of good users, which is a significantly larger amount of potential steem then the curation reward pool.
I suppose one way to fix this would be to allow an account to refuse curation rewards much like you can (and you did here) for posting rewards. The "whale" accounts would then have their curation rewards spread out to all of the other accounts that voted on the posts.
And also away from a lot of good users. just sayin. The same pool still gets distributed wether they vote or not. Them voting makes the distribution different than it would have been otherwise, not necessarily better.
This seems like the easiest solution to me. "Refuse curation rewards" could simply be added to your account settings. I have no issue with Steemit devs wanting to be compensated for their work, but it does suck way too much out of the reward pool. Or maybe even a slider to reduce rewards by a certain percentage, just like you can choose to vote with only a fraction of your voting power. I don't think it's fair to say that the devs can't have any rewards at all, but maybe there's some middle ground that can be reached.
This, of course, requires a hard fork to implement, which means that it's a minimum of 2-3 months away (proposal, community feedback/review, implementation, testing, rollout) and would detract from our velocity on other items in our roadmap.
It's certainly a good idea, but I don't know if prioritizing such a feature in the pipeline to redirect 4% of total daily rewards (especially considering some portion of that 4% is actually being returned to the guilds doing the voting) is worth the loss of focus on our other critical improvements.
As we scale up as a team and organization we'll be able to do more things at once. Right now we are a small team.
(Yes, this is your prompt to refer world-class c++, javascript, and mobile devs to [email protected].)
I know a lot of C++ devs but sadly all of them are happily employed and not looking for new work. ;-)
When you put it that way, as affecting only 4% of total daily rewards, then yeah I wouldn't say it's a critical issue. More of a nice-to-have rather than a need-to-have. I don't know how much overall bandwidth you guys have, but the roadmap is an excellent plan and I definitely would prefer the team to stay focused on delivering those features. Any extra low hanging fruit that can be picked up along the way is simply icing on the cake.
It's nice to have external confirmation of our reasonableness sometimes. :^)