The entire curation experience will always rely on one's subjective opinion. If it's at least honest, I'm happy.

I don't think the problem of bad taste is anywhere near as bad as content indifferent voting. Suppose you have 100 people effectively doing the curating platform wide. Chances are the overall result would be far better than if the system just sold votes to the highest bidder (or in some failed case here, pay the highest bidder the most to promote). Of course there a chance that 70 of the 100 curators are all nut jobs with terrible taste, but the probability of that is next to nothing. And it would probably take that many nut jobs to end up with something as bad as when bid botting completely dominates trending.

I guess if it makes you feel any better, it's much hard curating competitively if you have a lot of SP under management than if you only had a smaller stake. In other words, you can likely do better if you curated yourself strategically than if you handed your SP to a team and paid a fee. Also, as more curation projects pop up, competition over fees and performance will play a part too. There are a lot of factors that can improve the curation process over time platform wide.

I don't think it's really feasible to ask passive investors to settle for next to nothing and not allow them to delegate to curation projects. Remember, they were getting almost 100% of voting rewards delegating to bid bots (before free downvotes were a thing). Now they're getting a lot less.

Overall, even if you truly believed that concentrated stake curation is just a terrible as vote selling (which doesn't make much sense), at least now they're only getting 50% of the voting rewards rather than splitting 100% of the voting rewards between the delegator, bid bot owner and vote buyer. So overall, purely economically, it's a big win.

Of course these days bid bot returns shouldn't expect to be seeing high returns any more, with the threat of downvotes.