You had a lot of stuff there I'm trying to take in :D

I agree that the curation structure should be changed because the current system doesn't incentivise user to upvote "quality content" per se, rather what is to be expected to collect lot of rewards, and that is usually authors who are popular. And popular doesn't necessary go hand in hand with "quality", whatever we perceive it to be.
Current system would work IF quality work always found good rewards, but the system currently doesn't work like that especially with poor content discovery methods which are almost nonexistent (excluding busy; there's some, and it's whole better than nothing). More distributed share of curation rewards I think would get people to actually vote the stuff they think is good rather than what is profitable. It needn't be equal proportionally but at least changed from the radical decrease. And that timebracket system of yours seems pretty cool to me: something that spices up some of that upvoting game from the "first voter advantage". Even though it's quite complex, I don't think a regular user really cares about the specifics knowing that his/her curation reward will in any case be worth more than 0, compared to a post earning hundreds of upvotes in current system which pretty much nets 0 curation rewards if upvoted by a small user.

You definitely have interesting ideas that are long thought out with the "taxation" which funds the new user delegation.

But flagging... I'm not going to think that further whether I agree with it not affecting payouts; I'm just getting a headache from the flagwars when trying to figure out what to think about it 🙈
But it's certainly something to consider.

Oh, and I also agree that the payouts period to be extended from the 7 day period. I'm sure there's a way to make this happen somehow.