Yes - the 'circle voters' and ROI delegators were never expected to become manual curators I guess. They have had the maximizing on their mind for years now and are just now figuring out how that maximization works under the EIP.

I even suspect that a few of the big SP-holders that are doing manual curation now are going to automate that in a while - and just autovote the authors that they 'discovered' and manually created the most in those first few weeks/months.

I really don't know how we can make 'real curation' more attractive. There's zero content discovery except for 1) going through the depressing New tab on steemit.com, or 2) following feeds from projects like curangel/c-squared/ocd/curie, and 3) the random resteem - but without a 'note section' with our resteems it's hard to explain to your followers why you want them to click on a certain post. (Which is why I personally rarely resteem)

Very effective 'more posts like this' functionality is needed to get people to click on titles of posts before seeing which author wrote that post or even knowing if you follow that author or not.

Also: a tab with 'most commented on' would help out in discovering interesting content that get people to engage, something interesting to browse through but not influenced by high payouts/votes from exclusively high-SP users.

For those reading and willing to curate lesser-known users: the frontpage of steempeak.com has a few tabs like general/science/photography which shows the posts in a nice tiled layout that are curated by actual curation groups like photofeed and c-squared. These are not curation groups with a HUGE monetary impact per say, but they do search for quality content and try to get them more visibility. Browsing through those tabs and dropping a vote here and there especially on names you've never seen before will go a long way <3

Thanks.