Heh if the difference between honest curation and profit maximization curation is 10% vs 18%, it's already shrunk considerably from pre EIP where honest curation was making maybe 1/4 that of vote selling or bid botting.

Curation is a zero sum game, once better tools are available and profit maximizing curators attempt to undercut each other, it should balance out over time. Some of the free downvotes will likely over time find their way towards over rewarded authors too. This process will take time as right now outright voting selling and circle jerking is still rampant and are absorbing all the free downvotes.

Big bid bots like smartsteem and OCDB recently just switched to curation. OCDB is completely manual I think. Whatever profit maximization curation is, it beats the shit out of straight up vote selling. And it's hard to say if in the long term it's a bad thing at all. We want people to be rewarded for curation. We want it to be competitive vs vote selling.

Ultimately, vote selling/circle jerking etc gets you nearly 100% of your voting value back and curation 50%. We want the downvotes to keep the former in check so eventually most users settle for the latter. Everyone polices each other to keep the place honest.

When linear was introduced it took over a year for things to get really bad. We're only 2 weeks in after EIP. Maybe it'll fail, I don't know, but it seems way premature to call it.