The cut from 50% to 25% was intended to reduce the concentration of curation rewards going to the largest stakeholders
Almost every issues with steem comes from the huge disparity in power, a lot of feature have been built to mitigate this but they create even more issue. Why not just solve the power distribution problem at the root? Pretty much all the curation rewards problems are cause by this influence disparity and many other stuff like no voting on comments,bots domination,scalability,user experience,etc...