There are a few things that came to my thought:

I feel that reducing curation rewards would discourage people from powering up. If we have less staked tokens, there would be more supply in the market which can reduce the price of Hive even further. We have to find ways to make people stay staked/invested.

I feel that we should talk more about the flat reward curve. I'm not sure what drawbacks it has but it would be great if we can implement a system where the time of vote shouldn't be a factor for how much rewards someone gets. That's what currently encourages people to rush with votes at the 3-minute mark to grab maximum curation rewards.

Auto votes are mostly done for sniping purposes. Most of the auto votes are in such a way that the snipers pick authors who get rewarded with big votes and vote them as early as possible at the 3-minute mark.

Many people may not agree and even I'm not sure what I'm going to say now will make sense or not. But would it be a good idea to give random curation rewards from the reward pool for the curators? Of course, the stake they hold should also be criteria taken into consideration but let the vote rewards be a random value between an upper range and lower range. This would not remove the auto votes completely but at least give a solution against auto votes that are done for sniping purposes.