You've made a good post. However, just like I commented on captaindingus' post, I disagree on many of the points.

Issue 1: some people never power up their Hive earnings, send their earnings to exchanges, and don’t own Spellbooks. To me, none of these are problems, except the last one, in regards to getting Splinterlands assets.

Here's how Hive works: person A makes a post, person B upvotes that post, payout day comes and (assuming no other upvotes or downvotes) person A gets half of that upvote value, person B gets the other half. That means the curation account is getting their share no matter what the poster does with their earnings. Since the curation account is Splinterlands, the best possible outcome is that the poster uses those earnings to buy Splinterlands assets. However, it's their earnings, they are free to do as they please with them. Assuming there's no abuse of any kind, they made a post about Splinterlands, followed the rules and they deserve an upvote for whatever size the curation team believes it should get. The post quality is what should determine the upvote, not what people do with their earnings or what's the size of their wallets and how much disposable income they have.

The only part that I agree is that accounts without a Spellbook shouldn't get Splinterlands assets. In fact, I only found out very recently that the art contest pays out packs, which the other contests don't.

Issue 2: This one I agree that it is an issue, simply because the Splinterlands account is getting less rewards. The downvote from the Hive whale is a big insult to the poster. I've gotten a DV that was higher than the upvote I got so it ended up costing me more. All because of a personal issue I have nothing to do with. It's also because the Hive system is flawed but that's another issue I don't want to get into. As for having a bigger curation team: I've tried contacting people about getting on the team and never got a response.