100% agree on this, I've done this test countless times to check what gets upvotes by curation groups and there seems to be a total neglect there. (I wrote about it over a year ago Link)

Imo what would help Hive is if there was a link between someone their own upvote value and the % of the author payout they get. If your upvote is worth 0.00$ only 20% or so of the author payout with 80% being burned. if 0.01$ is yuour own upvote, it gets bumped to 40%, 0.02$ to 50%, and so on exponentially in a fair way. All this without affecting the curation earnings. (the numbers are just pulled out of the air as an example and by no means are what it should be exactly)

Also KE ratio should include incoming Delegations, that should boost the demand on the rental market.

This would actually give an incentive for everyone that is posting here to hold some Hive Power and do some curation themselves while it allows curators to just vote on the best things without the need to be worried that what they give is just being dumped on the market like in so many cases now.

Anyway, to be fair, right now the author rewards are only a small part of the problem as the HBD overhang and converstions along with the DHF is what mainly has been butchering the Hive Price.