What an excellent and common sense post, Steve. How many users have we alienated through this aversion to short form media? Yet, I see many 'poor' posts garnering $100s. There is too much perceived correlation between length, quality and reward.
If people judged posts primarily on sincerity and integrity AND we dumped autovoting and curation trails, we would have a much purer allocation of rewards.
The main problem however, is that curation is so well rewarded. Some large stakeholders often don't care about what they're voting on, only that they get their 10 full upvotes a day done to maximise their returns.
Here is where we find a paradox. It's often the same people who care the most about their curation rewards who are the ones who are in disagreement with encouraging short-form content!
Another problem that is getting worse is the stigma attached to short-form content. Many people are scared to death to make short posts for fear of being muted or ignored by large stake holders. Many feel the need to write huge posts, but I see many posts 'doubled' to make them appear to have large word-counts by posting in two languages.
We need short-form. We need a full suite of social media tools and mostly, we need the support of the mighty and powerful to encourage users to use them!