I feel everything you are looking for is actually achieved by the incentive of curation rewards. I agree with most of it, and I'm confident that curation rewards go some way in achieving our common goal.

The big elephant in the room is the complete lack of concerted marketing and outreach programs to actually bring in new users. Indeed, curation rewards are a novel idea that may encourage millions of users to sign up.

Let's see how the system functions at a representative scale - millions of users. Again, like I said, with the Communities feature coming in the end of the year, we can think of eliminating voting rewards for more direct curation/moderation rewards.

Till then, we'll have to agree to disagree about the impact of curation rewards. :)