I agree that "curation" has no practical value in theory, but it does seem to have a very legitimate psychological value. In fact before we even have this conversation I'd have to point out that calling it "curation" is a farce, as upvoting content doesn't curate anything and it is the frontends of Hive that curate all the content seen by almost all users.

The psychological value of curation is that it does seem limit greed a little bit by making giving money away a pill that becomes a little bit easier to swallow. I call it a "kickback" instead of "curation" because that's what it is after the changes we've made over the years. At this point it's a flat 50/50 partnership between ourselves and the person being allocated inflation.

We can try to make an argument that this is wasted inflation... but that would be a lie unless you believe we shouldn't be diluting stake that isn't powered up. Seeing as most stake not powered up sits on exchanges and acts as an existential threat to the network it would be foolish not to dilute it with inflation emissions like "curation". We don't want centralized agents with massive amounts of stake to have even more power.