Well, you do bring up a really important issue, here.

There are a lot of things about the original Steemit "intent" (as I interpret it) that I really appreciate.

I manually curate quite a bit-- but yes, it is time consuming. But I enjoy reading/interacting with quality content. This is a social platform to me, and I really like the "social" bits. So I curate both content and comments I feel are valuable or add something. The latter seems to be becoming rarer and rarer, sadly. I also really like the idea of Steemit being a sort of "gift economy" where the primary thing we do is "pay it forward." I like the idea that I can reward a content creator for something well done.

I DON'T like the whole "reverse auction" thing... and frankly, I just ignore it... probably to my detriment. When I have a response to a piece, it is NOW... I don't want to sit here and ponder "Oh, I wonder if my timing is right?" I don't like being under gun by a TIMER... sometimes I'm inspired to leave a 300-word comment... that takes TIME, and I don't want that to have an "opportunity cost" because now it will post "too late."

And that's another thing I DON'T like. The excessive reliance on automation and bots by many strikes me as counterproductive. Communities are built by PEOPLE, not by code, automation or bots. I'm not saying outlaw bots... but perhaps we can benefit from rethinking how they interact with the system. I know some bots are "human activated;" they retrieve a specific type of content for their operators who then curate manually... that's a great use of a bot. Others... seem like they only serve to add "dust" to the blockchain... a 0.3% bot upvote from an account with 3000SP? What IS that?

I am not a developer, but perhaps we can find a way that lifts-- not necessarily financially-- content that was "human upvoted/curated" as opposed to bot serviced to greater visibility, things might change. A sort of "This content was reviewed and approved by an actual HUMAN" stamp of approval as a mechanism to land something in "hot" or "trending."

One possible solution-- although I am not sure how to implement it-- would be the "gamification" of curation. Literally find a way to track and monitor what's being manually curated and have a "What people are reading" category next to "hot" and "trending" that is generated (again, I am NOT a developer!) by some weighted-average-algorithm that looks at manual curation and the SP behind that and comments being made and so on... a sort of "this is the best content if there were no bots" list. Just throwing it out there as a brainstorming topic...

Edited to add: To wit, this comment was probably added "too late" and I found this post "too late" (and that's not a complaint, just an observation) and as a content curator all I really care about is "is this content WORTHY?" not damn timers and clocks. Either the content is "good" or it's "not good." That worthiness doesn't increase or decrease with time. And that's where the curation system has "issues."