How about this: Those who need ROI on their staked hive but don't have an hour to give to it could hire a curator or two. Pay them a small % of the net take and everybody benefits. I'm sure some hungry curators would apply for such jobs.

It's been tried. But it rapidly gave way to auto-vote bot based voting. Why? Because curating well is a huge amount of work, so only altruistic curators really do it. And it's much easier to just assign your votes to a vote-bot and reap the same or larger rewards (no need to pay that curator now).

Oh, the other associated problem is that if you don't choose your curator very carefully, he might just start voting only his friends, etc. You can probably imagine some of the problems that can result.

Change the staked voting protocol. I don't care what change, just change it so all voting trails are void and have to be reset by the account owner.

There's no obvious way to stop auto-voting by any stakeholder, large or small. This is a purely technical challenge that there's no clear way to overcome. And this applies to all stakeholders, large or small.