Curation is valuable to the whole platform.

//Edit: to be clear, I'm not talking about the "curation" happening now on Steem, but the natural curation behavior.

Image a new user come to this website to look for popular contents. She'll see the trending page. The posts are there because the curators (voters) have done their work.

Image a Q/A post which have thousands of replies. It's the curators that brought the most valuable replies to the top, so saves later readers' time.

To me the concept of curating is flawed because it forces people to vote for stuff they are not interested in. It goes against the natural will of people. As more and more content gets published on the steem blockchain the less sense it will make to curate, why would you upvote family pics from people you never heard of? People are going to form their own little communities and upvote within that community, curating content on the whole blockchain makes no sense.

It's not the concept of curating that is flawed, it's the curation reward distribution mechanism that is flawed. A bad-designed incentive mechanism brings bad results. IMHO it's better to make the incentives aligned, but not eliminate them. I strongly suggest you to read my post and the discussions there: https://steemit.com/curation/@abit/benefits-of-pure-linear-reward-distribution .