I'm mostly on your side that it isn't harmful, and definitely not in relation to #3. I see a small harm when good authors simply get overlooked because it's convenient to be neutral and vote on burnpost. It's not motivating for them to see that it's mostly #3 and #2 out there, so everyone going #1 instead counts.

I intentionally avoided mentioning it by name, but
regarding curation projects I'm really happy how @curangel works out. While slip ups happen, the general allocation is pretty good in my view. It's public info which curator curated what, so if one of them goes bad it's hopefully recognized sooner than later. Votes also aren't happening instantly and there are a few people checking the queue from time to time. Downvotes are used and delegators can decide where their share of those goes (which isn't used enough, it would be nice to spread those further).
We mostly have very small delegators though, the original idea of giving an option besides autovoting to bigger stakeholders didn't go off. I also published the code so people could set up their own group if they prefer to have better control over who curates with their stake.