I really hope these changes do go ahead, as I said in my suggestions for curation awards post, voting is such a small part of curation and is the lowest level of involvement.

Replies are higher because they increase the SEO value and the content value of the post. Next up in the value chain, is if you post a relevant link (hard to police) to a trusted site or even an internal one, that people use. Then at the top of the value tree is sharing to FB or Twitter, as that brings in new readers and possibly users to the platform.

So someone who does all of these things, should be valued more than someone who just votes, seeing as you can just scroll through voting on articles, without even reading them.