About curation, looking at the activity on your burn posts from the other day, that is simply not factual. Many of the largest votes came several hours after those were posted

The later votes won't do well with curation though (nowhere near 50%) simply because they are late in the stack. I personally vote on them late in order to reduce the Trending effect, but I know i'm giving up a lot of curation rewards by doing this.

I usually see at least $20 of votes within the first minute which means a lot of the curation rewards (on those votes) are being sent back to the pool and later votes are competing for scraps because of how curation works (you only earn good curation if you are one of the earlier voters).

Again, if everyone starts doing this, the system fails. Perhaps it's not something we should be championing?

No, that is silly logic. Think of it like dieting, or pretty much anything else. Too much of a good thing can be bad, but that doesn't make the good thing itself bad.

The amount that gets burned is up to stakeholder voters.