SteemPeak actually just added a feature that helps greatly with curation, LISTS! It may not be immediately obvious...but it does. You add different people to different lists, like maybe your favorite authors, or technology content creators, or artists, or photographers, then it makes curation really fucking easy...comparatively. Of the people you follow, and possibly even ones you don't, you can check them quickly, rather than necessarily adding them to auto-vote, and choose how much you vote them based on what they have posted, rather than just automatically at a set percentage.
I've been saying for a long time that Steem doesn't necessarily need one huge change to fix the problem of curation, but a lot of tiny features that just make it easier. Now, on SteemPeak, it's just a little bit easier to sort the people you might want to follow in different lists that you can check and upvote. Hopefully they also add a notification feature soon that's list enabled, so you can get alerts when people in certain lists post.
It's all about making curation easier.
I'd like to see a way where normal users can EASILY suggest posts for curation, then their followers can see that, separate from just resteems. Maybe then curators that work for different teams can see that someone they trust has suggested a post for curation, or even a few people, and then check that post, and then it makes it's way up the ranks, without having to go to Discord or some other shitty outside centralized app.
We all do curation on all social networks. We share funny memes and articles that we like, and those in turn have a chance to go viral. Problem is that they kinda borked it on Steem due to a combination of factors. So...curation here does kinda suck. Usually when they say curation they either mean just a whale getting paid for voting with his stake, or a bunch of minnows working way too fucking hard to find "good" content that should be rewarded, and getting paid pennies for their effort. So, in a sense, curation both sucks and is a really awesome thing, at times.
I think rather than a combination of factors, it is the results of one specific factor, and that is replacing actual curation with profiteering, or the ability to extract financial rewards for upvoting. A combination of factors borking curation results from this incentive to upvote, and contradicts incentive to recommend creation with incentive to extract money from creation.