I have spent half my life in rabbit holes and on soapboxes.
Without bringing in advertising, which will come one day and be detrimental to content, curation reward is likely the only way to get big investors in. I don't agree with the self-voting using pay for vote bots as this rewards poor quality content.
The return to manual curation is what I am trying to drive at but again, for massive accounts to spread their power usefully, they likely need help. For example, Blocktrades current vote is around 300 dollars and when time is good for Steem at only 2 dollars, that becomes 600. So, if they manually curate and want to give 100 dollars to each currently when Steem is low, they must read 30 articles a day. at 600, they must read 60.
Their kind of vote is the kind of money that should be going to good content and authors but there is probably no way one person can consistently read 60 articles a day AND do what they do in the normal world that has allowed them to have that kind of investment. But, with a couple curator employees, they can easily spread their wealth widely.
let's say they give 15 x $100 votes (33% votes [5 full] ) and then 75 x $20 votes. That would be equal to 10 full votes. To do this they need to read and check for quality and find 90 worthy articles. What are their chances? Delegating the curation part may be able to give finding the 75 to 3 or 4 people while they themselves can find the 15 they want to vote a lot. I think my maths works..
For better or worse, bots aren't leaving anytime soon so actually having manual curators control them helps.
Well, being on the receiving end of a blocktrades upvote this week, I can say I am for this proposal, If the big guys need help I would happily provide it for them. This does seem like a good way to "spread the wealth" without doing it unsupervised
So I think that you're looking at Steemit as a purely investment strategy as opposed to a social media platform. I'm looking at it from the Social Media perspective. Rewards are ancillary. Therefore, blocktrades not using all of his votes on a daily basis does not negatively impact the quality of content provided on the platform. On the contrary, bot votes for poor quality content does negatively impact the platform.
Now, the rewards are definitely a draw for any new user. Other users will like the idea that this is all based on a blockchain (others will never adopt for the same reason-something about my writing lasting for eternity is partially harrowing).
I don't think that whales need to be 100% active on the platform in order for it to be successful as the platform grows. There will be plenty of medium size fish who keep everyone afloat (think middle class in an economy). The uber rich do very little, the upper middle class does the most (trying to become uber rich), the rest of the middle class does what they can, and the poor are trying to climb up the ladder.
I think that in a mature Steemit economy, we will see something like that. And if a whale wants to augment their income on the platform again, all they have to do is put in some manual effort themselves (or to a delegate).