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My bad, I should have been more clear. Deserve is not the right word here.
The idea is to determine who is a unique individual and who is a sockpuppet. There could be specific requirement in place to determine that and witnesses would have to put users that fit requirement on the list.
If we can’t trust witnesses to do this simple task I'm not sure how we are supposed to trust them with millions of dollars…

It is not a matter of trust - as a witness, I think this is a really bad idea! As the site scales to millions (possibly billions) of users, I would have to spend my time each day reviewing every person on the site to see who is worthy of the list. Where would I find the time? I would probably need to hire a full-time staff! :)

[Edit] Also, how am I going to be able to tell who is 'good' vs. 'bad', 'real' vs. 'fake'?

I guess you are right it's difficult to do as people will create elaborated shill accounts. Even profil verification picture can be faked, and yeah it would take a lot of time too. Trustless guilds are by far the best solution to solve distribution issue. Do you know how would curation rewards be allocated in a guild?

I've created two posts with proposals, but it is very much up in the air right now.

This is a very simple proposal, although it does not get into actual 'guilds'. It would just be allowing whales to delegate their voting power to another user:
https://steemit.com/curation/@timcliff/human-vs-bot-curators-introducing-human-competition-into-the-equation-allow-whales-to-delegate-curation-power-to-dolphins-and

Here are thoughts on actual curation guilds:
https://steemit.com/curation-guilds/@timcliff/thoughts-for-curation-guilds