You bring up a great point. Right now, the only value I see in Steem Power is the potential to self vote, to provide a minimum payout to one's own post. Nobody really cares about the curation awards, unless they have A LOT of Steem Power, but then again, as you say, that Steem Power is better utilized on self voting.

In my opinion, for curation to be inspiring enough to work well, There should be some real profits to make. When you find a good post you should be thinking "YES; I FOUND A GREAT POST AND IT HAS ALMOST NO VOTES. YES!". Right now we're just thinking "YEAH; WHATEVER, $0.001 FOR ME".

I imagine there should be some algorithm to accomplish this, like collecting a percentage of rewards from all posts and concentrating them on voters who manage to bring up good content, with some mechanism to compensate a bit for posts that always make it to the top.