well said. I only vote for things I like and don't really think about the curation rewards. I am concerned about the price of Steem continually falling though.

this pie could be huge if everyone stopped trying to get more STEEM and started trying to make STEEM more valuable.

How do we make Steem more valuable? That's the real question. Increasing the user base hasn't seemed to work. I joined when there were 60,000 users and it has doubled since then and still has not increased in value. It will take a lot more users and things to use Steem for to increase the price.