Very limited is not the best words to use there. I know of at least two dozen, off of the top of my head, that refuse to post anything substantially qualified as 'quality' (which is also subjective to the eye of the beholder), simply because their posts consistently got overlooked and were never curated 'properly' as they should have been. It still happens. I used to write massive stories that took hours to compose between gathering proper graphics and making it 'pretty'. Sure a few reached 100+ dollars - but only because of bidbots. Not a single actual whale vote aside from grumpycat who thought I made too much on it. I recently wrote a story on my first fish, I thought it deserved at least 15$ but nope. Nothing. 6 minute read with over 1000 words.

Which, is a whole other ballgame there. There is a post right now on trending from @krnel that is twice as good in my mind (pun intended) as the one written by @acidyo about @ocd. Krnel's is worth half as much. The one from Krnel is also a shorter read than my fish story. What gets the most attention around here seems to mostly pertain to the blockchain and actual content creators, don't get near the credit they deserve. The 'whales' would rather just support the 'whales' so they can remain the 'whales'. Not all, but most. Voting habits and the blockchain doesn't lie. Some even sit at 100% VP/Mana for days until one of their 'whale' friends makes a post. And we won't even get into the biases from 'communities' and the separation that bred into the system.

Shitty auto-voting is bad, but I use it. Not necessarily for the curation, but to offer steady support because like you, I can't be here 12 hours a day. I am in agreement with you though (once again - kind of an odd thing, but hey, it's been happening more frequently the past few months), reducing the curation rewards is not the answer. The actual content creating community, all inclusive of Hive, was already pretty upset when it went to 50/50 and so many had to adapt. You take that away again and as you say, we will be hard pressed to attract any investors or even users, for that matter.