I don't begrudge the devs etc their pound of flesh at all. I was thinking about this today and thought it would be nice if they had their own 'community' and could simply circle jerk (in a nice way!) each other to get a decent return on their hard work, a community that was programmed NOT to appear within the trending feed.
As a consumer as opposed to creator, I will consume content wherever I find it interesting. I'm fickle in that sense.
the rewards pool is for contributions that bring value to the ecosystem
Then we need to define what the 'ecosystem' is about exactly and create guidelines to suit. The problem comes when one realises that Hive, the blockchain, means a million slightly different things to a million different people!
Content has zero actual value, the value is only created by the consumer's opinion but here, it doesn't work that way. People have a sense of entitlement that if they create something, they should be rewarded and because people with large stakes can earn curation rewards from upvoting, their opinion of the content matters not, only its value as a means to reward the curator.
There is something all a bit skew-whiff which means we will never find that balance I guess and the whole system will be (as I've writte many times before) no more than a computer game.....
Thanks for taking the time to reply @justineh and I hope you and your loved ones are staying safe and sane :-)