Good questions. Honestly, we don't know exactly what will happen and can only speculate on it as there is quite a bit of human behavior & emotions involved, which creates a variable that is unpredictable.

My opinion is this --> STEEM might get harder to earn for some authors with trace amounts of STEEM POWER.

With that said, my belief is that high quality content will actually earn more with these economic changes. How will they earn more? Here are a few reasons:

1. Communities such as the ones you listed as well as steemleo will continue to reward in our currencies (such as LEO) for high-quality content that is relevant to our platform. You may have noticed that you can often earn 3x+ in rewards of other tokens compared to what you might earn in STEEM
2. Downvote pool will redistribute rewards that are currently being drained from the pool by abusers back to the content creators adding value to Steem with good content
3. Higher curation rewards = more incentive to vote on other high quality posts that might get big upvotes because of their quality
4. Higher curation rewards + the new rewards curve also = more power to voting trails as people will be more incentivized to vote together rather than separately.

Again, this is just my speculation, but I truly believe that this will have a positive impact on authors, curators and investors on Steem. Only time will tell with certainty :)

hope this helps!