I think that's definitely one experiment that should be tried. I say that because I don't think that it is feasible to pay a curation reward that justifies the work done when curating. So it's always just a "bonus" and the real motivation for honest curation needs to be something beyond a pure monetary reward. So I think the curation rewards are mostly enticing for those who want to get them without doing real curation work (i.e. passing the work off to a voting bot).

But my feeling at this point is that too many people are concerned about the impacts of any economic change to try them out on the base token. That's not a particularly new sentiment, we've seen a lot of irrational fear every time any economic change has been suggested. As a simple example, I'm pretty sure I could have suggested increasing curation rewards, and I would have gotten very similar responses (well, except I would have been told that increasing the curation rewards would destroy the platform). So that leaves me with two possible conclusions: 1) we have an ideal reward system already and we shouldn't change it or 2) fear of change dominates in this case. I think 2 is the most likely case :-)

So my guess is we'll need to wait for HMTs to actually do any such experiments because a change there doesn't represent a change to the entire system and is therefore less likely to induce irrational fear. But I think it's important to discuss ideas for economic changes before we finish implementing HMTs. Otherwise, the correct "knobs to turn" won't be there.