First off, it looks like the reward pool has been more like 51K/day lately.

Second off, you act as though someone is putting this in their pocket. This benefits Hive, not any specific person. In fact, it has a large impact on the current price of Hive which is many times higher than it was when this started. Hive has also be extremely stable, in fact it has been better than many tokens.

Granted it is ugly, but it is effective.

I also believe the reward pool is larger than what we need for the current user base and quality of content. Many times I have a hard time finding anything to vote and putting it into the DHF is a better option. It is much easier to vote when you have a small amount of stake, but when your vote is $200+, it becomes far more time consuming and difficult to distribute that stake well.