@ats-david I do agree with your point regarding the need to attract readers, but I would respectfully disagree with the suggestion that increasing curation rewards would increase readership. What it absolutely would do is increase voting bot activity which does not create engaged readers entering the platform. Some authors have already written about the shady nature of the number of upvotes (in some cases) far exceeding the number of page views on a post and how the outside writing/publishing world will view that. I think the idea of increasing the rewards for commenting has a much better chance of bringing a larger and more engaged readership to Steemit.
Personally, I am on the fence about the curation reward system. When a small pool of individuals hold a disproportionate amount of voting power, the system as a whole will break.
The end goal of curation rewards (as I understand it) is to reward individuals who spend time and effort to discover good content , upvote it and increase its visibility and separate it from the content which is not excellent, plagiarized, etc. When voting power is pooled and concentrated so severely into the hands of a select few, then the content only becomes what they and/or their proxies decide it will be and curation as intended does not exist. I think this is a large reason for the exodus of quality authors who do not write content for the more popular tags.
I don't think treating whales as Preferred Shareholders and removing their voice from voting on content is entirely fair either. If I took tremendous risk and put in my own time and resources into a company, I would want both a Return on Investment and a vote. What is very transparent is the voting system is incredibly broken. I would suggest rather than eliminating voting power above a certain threshold, perhaps geometrically reduce the power of each additional 10,000 vests or so. This way returns can be had, voting power can be increased, but the rate of increase is drastically reduced and allows the field an opportunity to have a true voice and impact with their vote. It would also encourage more to build STEEM power, because it becomes an attainable goal with real rewards of vote power.
My $0.02 anyways.