Hello @smooth That all makes perfect sense. Thanks for your post
Where there is quality, up-votes will come. I think that is point well worth making, especially from yourself and many other users trawling through 000's of posts per day. It's will be interesting to see the rate of organic change we see in Author Rewards.
There are certainly going to be new users coming along who will 'redesign the wheel' (so to speak) on Quality Content on Steemit. This will be the ultimate test of how fair the Curation Rewards are. NOT someone coming along attempting to 'copy' successful authors...