not at all! I used your innocent question as an opportunity to REEEEE all over the place, precisely because I feel and hear and see your frustration alongside that of witnesses and people who bought steem and coders and newbs alike. We're all standing over Steem right now poking it with a stick saying DO SOMETHING.

So much like chatting with Bluefin earlier, the best I can do is pull some devil's advocate things out that I do think the EIP would be able to do and some truths that would be "for" the EIP, regardless of my personal feelings either way.

• Self voters do have to share. Right now, the worst egregious (important distinction) self voters are getting the majority of their vote back as author rewards without even thinking, and sharing less of it with other people who curate them. In a 50/50 world, the self voter puts more of their cut into the curation pool to be shared between everyone. So if nothing else changes, the people also voting will earn a bit more themselves and the author-self-voter has to share a bit more. Not ideal, but also no worse than the currant 'instant' unshared return with author rewards.
• Curation does go up. When more minnows (or more everyone) votes together, the rewards go up. The stacked effect increases. Smaller schools of minnows will be able to curate, and actually see higher potentials back from their curation. Right now, we teach minnows, hey- you should be commenting and posting because you have to do that to earn since your vote is worth so little and your slice of the curation pie is so small so don't even worry about that! There's the thought (and some truth) that smaller accounts would actually see an increased effectiveness in curating good stuff or in schooling, because the split for curating makes it more equitable for them.
• If rewards for curation go up, then to take advantage of that, you need a bigger vote. The only way to get that is to power up. Now, don't shoot the messenger because this is a 'one size' statement, but we do have a lot of minnows who stay minnows because they pull out everything they earn and love that posting keeps letting them earn more. They're powering down already. Right now. (So are whales.) These same minnows are scared they will have to share more post rewards, but technically could be doing the same thing as the whales right now if they weren't powering down. Powerdowns are rampant already; causing more than an already increasing number is arguably a drop in the bucket of problems we already have and are already going unaddressed. So if people could earn more by having a bigger vote, which requires powering up, then there will be some (whether the number is significant or not) who would power back up to earn more faster.
• There are no rewards at all without curation. Why don't we all buy in initially, then use that to vote our own work, and keep 100% of the rewards? It sounds like a stupid question, but we're actually closer to that than not right now. A curator whale controls just as much allocation of the finite reward pool at 0/100, 25/75, 50/50, or 100/0. Same with smaller accounts. But where smaller accounts have literally only the ability to gain by being curated, a whale may not- so while we cannot remove stake commensurate control from a whale, we can tip the variables to make it harder for them to show up, write a sentence, and upvote it to keep everything. If nothing else, changing that cut actually places them in a position to lose more than say, a minnow, who couldn't just drop a fat vote on themselves and keep it anyways. They need other voters. All content creators need content consumers. If it's less lucrative for a whale to self vote, then it starts becoming just as easy for them to start voting on stuff to earn, and that starts spreading stake to places that wasn't seeing it before, which is, overall a net gain in a lot of cases. Distribution is a huge problem right now.

people won't stay in a place where their former rewards are leaving their meager pockets to enter the very fat wallets of others. (for not a drop more work , mind you.)

• people aren't staying. They already feel like this. They're already leaving. Any curation that leaves their wallets is a DIRECT result of them being voted by someone else already. So if we are pointing out that more curation leaves them to someone huge, it is also pointing out that they got a vote from someone huge. Right now, not a lot of someone huges are doing much voting, and not a lot of someone smalls can curate for a bigger cut. Either the huges get out and vote to collect more curation (meaning they are spreading more voting around than they were previously) or they keep voting themselves and the smalls are able to jump in and take more of that without a drop more work.

On PALnet, people are suddenly excited to curate. Some people are tired of writing but don't beat themselves up over missing a "daily post"... they just get out and vote! People are getting bigger and finding more feeds. 50/50 is looking AWESOME. But PAL isn't steem. The economic context is different. The 50/50 isn't the causation, it's a correlation with a much better distribution. Steem distribution is what it is, and there's no taking what someone has bought, earned, or mined, so we can't expect any numbers to behave the same. There are absolutely some logical conclusions about why it can and should work, but logic means nothing in the face of human behaviour. So the biggest and hardest pill to swallow right now is that the 1% have to change pre or post, yes or no EIP... and while some of those are witnesses, a majority of the green you'll find are actually going to be NON-witness whales, who have to post (and many feel to self upvote) to earn. You and me and all the red numbers... we don't get to touch that right now, and I'm not talking about downvoting (that is a whooooole other essay and I'm all for it. Plus, darling Taraz just nailed it.) They can drop an upvote on whatever they make and happily stay in their own bubble knowing they get most of the value and anything else from others is bonus. Their voters in many cases are just coming around for scraps. In the system that we have, what's better for small authors by some logic is fucking fabulous for the 1% that tend to put a black eye on our economics. What's worse for the small authors by some logic actually really does have a good chance of at the very least redirecting some of that untouchable curation to more people, which doesn't really change us much further from where we are.

The numbers above are an application of future circumstances overlaid on existing behaviour, with no accounting for the fact that attempting to accurately model future behaviour has to take into consideration environmental stimuli. The math in your post just says "here are people who have figured out the best way to do 25/75 for themselves, and let's add some numbers assuming that no one reacts with an equal and opposite reaction to the force of new numbers via 50/50." That's not an accurate picture any more than saying that the EIP is gonna fix steem and it's lambos on the moon in a quarter. But our biggest mistake is assuming that without some change in the top in ANY distribution, and HF, and any situation, that that 1% of black eyes are going to fade out and heal up just because. So slapping pieces of HF together needs to come with cultural change and a lot of that has to start focusing on uncoupling our intrinsic feel that "the money as it is RIGHT NOW is the only thing keeping people here."