Big users who either post and vote-trade daily to take max rewards from the pool are getting paid too much for their content compared to what they would be making on any other site. What they do is pretty similar than to just delegate to a bid bot and earn close to 100% back that way. Curation is quite broken in general where it doesn't matter what content you produce you get the same amount of votes if you are a big account or have the right friends. So yeah its mostly about your second point.
In a perfect system quality content no matter what account size would get the highest rewards, not only that but also the people creating the content and the way they treat their following. Today we are seeing people only posting their daily 2 shit posts - setting up bots to votetrade the same amount with others as if they were self-voting 100% and then they leave without giving two shits what their followers or readers are saying. Same goes for those buying votes to "promote" their content, many are just doing it for the profit of buying those votes which should not be profitable. Look at the posts in trending right now, some of those are literal ads to other cryptocurrencies and they are getting a positive ROI back from "advertising". No platform in the world gives you rewards for advertising something nor should it.
With free downvotes I can see this changing radically as these people know they should not be making these rewards in a more fair system and they won't be able to do much if the majority of curators are downvoting their posts to at least make it cost them to advertise on our platform, same thing will go for vote-traders and other low effort garbage.
The downvotes combined with 50% curation will incentivize curators to reward more quality instead since quality won't be downvoted as much meaning they will get much bigger rewards from posts that have not been downvoted so they won't risk voting on garbage posts knowing it might get downvoted and we can see a better system evolve.
I know it may cause a lot of problems such as retaliations, ganging up to downvote others out of spite, etc. I hope the community will work together to resolve these issues and that the new system will in general work out much better over time than the zombie state we got now.