Looking at it from an author's point of view, lowering the curation reward will disincentivize powering up of stakes and hence, less reward for authors. Even though you pointed out that governance participation might still make people to power up their stakes but that is just about it. I can just power up my stake and give zero hoots about incentivizing authors. I mean, why should I waste my time trying to reward authors when I hardly get anything in return (literally)? Instead of rewarding authors, stakeholders might actually prefer self-voting and we might be on our way to seeing pictures of bananas on the trending page once again.

I still think the long term solution to all these problems is to remove the author and curation reward from layer zero, bring on the SMTs, and let each community develop their own tokens and system of moderation. Finally, I will say we leave the status quo while working towards a permanent solution of moving rewards to the community level.