The last portion is 50:50 curation. We have this on PALnet now. Note it hasn't ruined the platform. I actually feel a lot more incentive to make sure I'm curating every day knowing that a healthy dose of curation is coming back my way.
Whales have just as much time every day to do manual curation as everyone else. 50/50 works on Palnet because PAL is much more evenly distributed than STEEM. It's not a fair comparison.
It seems that Steemit Inc is pushing to make Steemit more of a content quality driven system, which is fine in its own right. I have a feeling that a lot of the smaller accounts frustrated with their diminished rewards will be driven to Palnet and other communities for rewards. Again, fine it its own right. What I'm hoping for, however, is that STEEM will somehow get distributed further in the coming years to decentralize and better secure the main chain. @ocdb is one way to do it, which is why I hope Steemit Inc and some other large stakeholders will keep supporting it for a long time.