@edicted long ago suggested that savings accounts with nominal interest could provide better ROI for investors without perverting curation with financialization, and I have strongly supported that idea, and still do. While HBD savings accounts with 20% interest (now reduced to 15%) advented, curation rewards remained potential and this allowed the financialization to continue to pervert curation.

There simply isn't any need for curation rewards. Myriad social media platforms enable folks to upvote content for subjective reasons, which is the definition of curation, and without receiving financial incentives for doing so. There is no lack of curation on any such platform. People have other values besides money that cause them to curate content, and in fact these values are far more valuable than mere money. Mike Tyson said that Don King (his manager) would sell his mother for a dollar, and curation rewards are perfect for the Don Kings of the world, but unnecessary for anyone that loves their mother more than a dollar - or any other societal value, like truth, justice, or apple pie.

Curation rewards are not only unnecessary, they are utterly contradictory to functional social media platforms, and Steem and Hive have well demonstrated why this is so.

Edit: also, the dust rule is simply economic reality. Transactions on the network have costs, and when they are below the cost of transmitting them, storing them, and etc., doing so drains the network of necessary resources. The dust rule isn't a conspiracy to cheat the poor, but is necessary to prevent spam and infinitesimally tiny transactions that have the same costs as ~$1M transactions from bleeding the network of resources.