I see your good intentions, but without autovoting many investor-type stakeholders would leave for good (because an investor is not primarily one that wants to spend hours per day manually curating). So even if autovoting sucks, without it Hive would have a massive selling pressure.
Blurtt had no DV, and it didn´t prosper too much. And it would invite all kind of spam.
Earning cap? Sounds good too, but would de-incentivize some of our top authors from producing their mostly qualiy content.
I think there are no easy solutions.
RE: HOW TO MAKE HIVE A BETTER PLACE