I share your feelings and agree with your description of the situation. However, what you suggest as a potential solution can be already done right now! At least most of it.. :)
We at Steeve are boosting manual curation. You can read more about how we are doing it in this post published last night.
Our idea is to use AI to process the vast amounts of new content created every day and learn the taste of our users. We can then use the AI for giving personalized recommendations of potentially interesting posts outside of user's regular feed. We will then upvote the most popular posts on our platform. This should improve the reward distribution, as good quality content will have a better reach and curators will be actually rewarded for their manual work, not like now. This should also motivate curators to accumulate more SP and thus improve the ecosystem overall, including the price of STEEM.
Would be curious to hear what you think about it :)
Posted using Steeve, an AI-powered Steem interface
Any steps taken towards quality content being found on here and brought to light is step to right direction. There's multiple ways to do it and AI is interesting approach, but one that tweaked right could provide a lot of value that sets your service apart from the rest.
Actually, I'll be switching over for Steeve for a while to see how it feels in action.