I think the Steemit developers and the community their system creates is the unfortunate problem here- much as I appreciate what Curie is doing, as you've said, it's unreasonable to assume that Curie will upvote more than one of your posts, especially on a regular basis, even though I've gotten quite lucky with Curie itself. And since Curie don't share their decision making process, it's difficult for an outsider to 'cater' their content to Curie's tastes in order to earn a sustainable income (which is likely why that decision making process isn't shared)

The big issue for me is that I don't get a lot of people engaging with my work after a Curie upvote, I might have a post that's at the top of the trending page but there's very little indication that any of the users who regularly read content from that tag, or even the curators themselves, actually read the content. I see the money as a bonus to the idea of Curie being a way to promote undervalued authors, so that those authors can earn followers who will actually regularly read their work. Of my 92 followers I'd say less than 10 of them are actually regular readers. And while I can try reaching out myself, Steemit's upvote bots make it very difficult to find worthwhile content that I can comment on which is relevant to the most used tags I attach to my content, both because of how much crap reaches the top and how much of that crap there is.

New users who join Steemit because I got excited about my upvote mostly do so just to support me, their friend or family member, and then because they don't much care for Steemit they may forget they signed up because of the long sign up process, or they'll lose their password because they're not used to platforms that don't have password recovery functions. That's on them of course, but it still puts people off despite how absurd that seems to an experienced user.

And if readers don't provide feedback, then there's no way of telling what kind of content you should be posting to promote regular engagement with your work. I simply don't feel we have enough actually good content creators or commenters on this platform yet, and even intelligent people might look at Steemit and think of it as a ponzi scheme or a whale farm.

I think these are all issues that the Steemit developers themselves have to solve. We can't tell a community to not abuse a system that is so readily ripe for abuse. Where there's a hole, water will flow through it.

Curie desperately needs to succeed in its mission statement to get the wider Steemit audience to notice- to me, I think Curie needs a way to make it abundantly obvious that their upvote is different from a whale or bot upvote. When I received my first curie vote, I assumed a whale or a malicious cartel had upvoted me. It wasn't until I enquired further that I learned more. When looking at a Curie upvoted post on the trending page, there's also no way to distinguish between a Curie vote and a whale vote, so people might instinctively avoid a Curie upvoted post on principle, assuming the post is garbage.

Just some thoughts.