authors don't take into consideration how many curators will be splitting the 50%
Help educate them.
in some cases it could be the same person behind all those curator bot accounts anyway.
"In some cases" sure, but that is not typical of any sort of social platform with actual users. We have to think about these things in terms of how they actually work on a platform-wide basis not one edge case.
Anyway, that is not the reason why curation rewards need to be higher for the system to have a chance to work and that's a whole different discussion. It is useful for people to understand (to the extent they don't already or are being misled), that one piece (author's share) goes to a single user and the other piece (curation) is typically split up many ways with each voter getting only a tiny slice.
It would be more effective if the frontend such as steemit.com explains this, hard for one person to educate everyone and new users join all the time (hopefully) :).
You're right the UI is terrible. Maybe it improves (which would be somewhat of a miracle at this point after years of mostly not, but you never know) or maybe other apps and UIs continue to grow and take its place.
Anyway, as a Steem witness and Steem stakeholder and not a steemit.com witness nor a Steemit shareholder, my primary concern is that the blockchain mechanisms function effectively, which from all available evidence at this point requires a much higher (than 25%) curation split.
Which, of course, I told them in 2016 and if they had listened to me we could have avoided onboarding thousands of users under the false promise that a system paying the author 75% of the payouts would actually work. Now, unfortunately, we have to pay the substantial costs (not only this one by any means) of remedying years of bad decisions and general neglect. Hopefully it isn't too late and we manage to turn things around.
I really hope we can turn things around, especially in the face of Voice. The funding will help, once SPS is in place I'm applying for a marketing budget for Dlease and Tokenbb, I still think they can go viral given the right marketing.