RE: The White Paper is not Holy, let's move on.
n=whatthefuckever is just a silly diversionary tactic to draw attention away from the fact that a system that relies on the grunt work of curating the contents of an entire social media ecosystem plus some to work, but only put the power to do so in the hands of a few friends at the start, was bound to fail. Would other social media sites be able to serve people the content they wanted to see if much of what was selected to be visible to them was determined by 100 people?
n=1 is goddamn fine. Authors and curators should be around 50%. Directly being the author of content should not have an incentive, it doesn't need to be high for people to still want to produce content. Curation won't be lucrative until witnesses implement the same exact reward payout options to curators as they do authors, getting double pummeled on the <25% and SBD >$1 is what did things in for now.
Yes, absolutely. Each of those factors just exacerbates this perfect storm.
I understand the plan with HF20 is to return the lost curation rewards to the pool, rather than the author, which will certainly help.
A return to US$1 SBD would be great too, or as you say, the choice to be paid curation rewards with that split (doing so would really flood the market with SBD and may bring it back to the peg anyway).
I'd support either 50/50 author/curator split OR quadratic rewards. (I'd personally prefer both, but either is much better than neither)