Yes, and your plan to "increase the value of steem" is by eliminating the incentives for curators - to "eliminate their gains."

Which in turn will increase the value of their steem. Also there is only a tiny minority earning decent rewards from curation.

No, that was a response to the notion that "rewards aren't necessary because people will vote anyway." You have argued this point repeatedly - that users don't need monetary incentives to vote for content. The exact same is true for people who post online and do it without monetary incentives. There is no difference at all in the two arguments. Since this system is based on incentives for both content creators and content consumers, because they both perform necessary tasks of creation and evaluation, the reward incentives are for both types of users. If you eliminate one or heavily favor one over the other, then the incentive structure becomes imbalanced and the results become skewed, as we have observed.

80-90% of voting is done by bots, curation rewards do not incentivize voting, they incentivize people running bots to earn money.
The structure is unbalanced today because of this, comments gets a few views and hundreds of votes, you can't get any more unbalanced than that.

What is your proof that the existence of curation rewards "harms" the system?

Read OP please

My argument is valid because people do post and do vote on other sites without monetary incentives. This is a fact. Let's not pretend that voting is done on other sites for free, therefore, we don't need to incentivize it. And let's not pretend that only voters are driven by the desire to earn. This isn't why curation is incentivized on Steemit. It's incentivized because this platform was created explicitly for the purposes of rewarding social media users for their social media activities.

Posting rewards and curation rewards are not comparable. There is no algorithm for posting. They are two very different things with different incentives.

This is irrelevant. The average user isn't supposed to be making "significant money" from upvoting posts in the first place.

Thanks for validating my point.

But users do have the opportunity to earn some money from being active on the platform.

90% of curators are bots, and so inactive on the platform.