I have a reasonably large amount of SP and, though I'm capable of creating quality content and probably earning far more, have spent the last year or so mostly curating to try and help spread rewards.

Here's what I've found:

1. You need at least 200,000 SP to make curating worth your time, in the sense of earning a decent hourly wage (say, $25/hr). Which is why so few people are doing it

2. Curating + commenting + self upvoting your comments is the only way most people can justify the time spent curating

I find 5-7 posts each day that are valued at less than $5 and that I feel are deserving of more rewards. I write a comment, upvote my comment and upvote the post. As my upvote is worth about $5 I get paid about $15/hr to curate.... but I can only work about 1hr a day due to the SP drawdown. I have about 37k SP.

Now if STEEM would just hurry the hell up and go to about $5/$1Bn cap - which is where it should by by any valuation - we would see a whole different game. But the ironic thing is that Steem's success is the what is keeping the price down - people are actually making a living and selling Steem to cash out and the pay the bills. There is very little incentive at this point to power up, so more sellers than buyers.

I think we need to increase curation rewards in a way that cannot be gamed by bots.

Perhaps we have a timer. We know how many words per post and how long it takes the average human to read that many words. If the upvote is given before the timer expires the curation reward is far less than if the upvote is after the timer. Then we kill the bots and encourage people to actually read.

Then we go one step further and increase the curation reward if a comment is written. And the longer the comment the better the reward.

My $.02