Curation is an integral part of Hive, but I do think that the curation auctioning adds complexity and draws attention without returning a great deal of value to the average user.
I agree with this. The curation auction diverts rewards to people who are best at playing the auto-voting optimisation game. This adds no value to the overall chain and these rewards could be better spent elsewhere.
It also adds unnecessary complexity and processing.
I don't see how you can move to evergreen content though. Unless you relax the restriction around voting twice (or multiple times) on the same content.
This is something that I don't know about (I am not technical) but I would assume that simplification would reduce processing requirements in some way or at least, be able to divert them to something more useful.
Voting twice after a certain (long) period isn't necessarily a bad thing. but If we consider that there are multiple tokens also, a post from the past that earned Hive could later earn LEO for example. Currently, there is no incentive for a frontend to bring closed posts in for new attention, as there is no way to reward it for author or curator.
In this case, I suspect those in charge of the kettle here rather wants you do the extra work of a Re-Post. };)