I never understood why people thought these changes will increase manual curation ...

I mean, I can't throw stones, I don't curate that much myself, mostly just have my list of people that I know tend to post high-quality things and I trail steemSTEM. Not really profit-oriented, but also not that curation focused.

But the 50/50 split combined with the new curve is really bad for small/new authors. 50/50 takes away more from their reward, and the curve reduces the likelihood of them being voted at all.

That old circle jerks resurface doesn't surprise me. I think I've even registered a slight increase in votes on my posts, probably because I have a stable amount of autovoters that bring consistent curation rewards.

It's dumb. We're losing people we're not going to get back. It's easy for me to onboard new people (thanks btw for steeminvite, I use it a lot), but keeping them around? It's hard. If that doesn't change, STEEM won't be worth anything anymore at some point, and all the whales that tried to get a bigger and bigger piece will sit on their pile of worthless crypto.