On the whole I think the changes are better. However, there are still serious issues facing our humble platform. Right now, we need to increase the amount of people curating content, so that we are sure to retain good authors.
Right now there are plenty of people who are consistent with crap or mediocre content because it's easy to keep a consistent pace up with content at that level. But if you're devoting more effort to superior content, you're taking a real risk that no one will see it and it will be dramatically undervalued. Therefore this is discouraged inherently.
I recently made a post about a potential solution to this (which I will not link to without permission). The idea is for a "curation weighted voting" mechanism whereby those who upvote a content creator may receive slightly greater rewards if that author then has a breakout post within a certain amount of time.
For example, if you voted on a post that didn't do so well, but three days later you vote on another of their posts that does, your share of the rewards goes up from what it was.