I think EIP generally helped in improving curation results, but I agree it's still far from perfect. One thing that would help would probably be somehow making it clearer how the rules work now, but the receipt of curation rewards comes long after the vote, so mostly people don't even know how the rules function, and so the actual functioning of the rules don't influence the behavior of many voters. But it's hard to see how to do this.

I don't think just dropping curation rewards would fix anything, as I suspect we'd see the rise of "gaming" based on a search of author rewards instead.