In an ideal world, community curators...

In an ideal world, the curation would be crowd sourced, not in the hands of a few.
(Like the original whitepaper described it)

word count

In the real world, word count doesn't matter.
I would even argue, that long posts are inferior, caused by lack of skill.

These community curators only appeared, after everyone realized, that the stakes are only in the hands of a few. And that those few were terrible curators.
It was meant as a 'crutch', until the stakes get wider distribution. With the idea, that employed 'curators' would help distribute the rewards better and wider.

I was opposed to that from the beginning. I was verbal about it.

And here we are (8 years later): Today, most people are writing content aimed at those curators.
What the masses, the people outside Hive may think of content, doesn't matter anymore.
8 years in, we still have the same if not a lower user count.

You have come to a very similar conclusion I have.
I come from a different perspective though; I curate content for 8 years, by hand.
I am just one dude, who saved up their rewards and I have a stronger vote than some of these curation circles.

But I also got lazy and greedy and I mostly vote for the people I follow, anyways.
And I stopped voting for people, who don't vote, or who don't accumulate stake.
Yet, I think 100 - 200 people of my weight (.5$ votes) would have a much more positive impact than 1 of the big curation grifter gangs.

Greed is in human nature, the original whitepaper adressed it, but that part was scractched in later revisions.
Originally, the idea was that a large group of greedy people, would be envious enough of each other, that they watch each other and pull anyone back down, who rises above (crabs in a bucket); So we'd end up with a lowest common denominator: quality of content.

Another thing, which comes with the way Hive works (and that's impossible to change), is that the reward-window on Hive is short. There are technical (game theory) considerations...
Anyways, as Hive rewards have a short window of 1 week, this would favor short form, timely content. Which would be the opposite of high effort, high word count posts.
But that also render curation gangs useless, so they don't vote for that.
These curators work hard to make their job harder, while clicky clicky liking a post isn't rocket science, really.

/rant off. (sorry)