The curve is an interesting question for sure. I personally believe there needs to be some curve, but not necessarily this exact one. The Steemit devs have studied things carefully and have their own presumably good reasons for proposing this particular curve. I'm pretty open minded on this particular aspect of it and will be looking to engage with both Steemit devs and the community on the matter going forward.

If the problem is self voting are there not coding solutions to limit that activity?

Not directly, since people can always move stake to different accounts, and generally tiny payouts are a huge burden on people trying to catch milkers/self-voters (who aren't always literally voting for the same account but may be voting for accounts of other friends/collaborators or sock puppets).

I'm sure your own efforts are well-indented and may well contribute a lot of value, but apart from AI (if even then) there is no way for a computer algorithm to tell the difference between your tiny votes and someone working with some friends/sock puppets to milk the pool to death by a thousand cuts, so we need to put some sort of speed bump in there.

Thanks for the raising the issue.