I think you've got some decent objections. Maybe you should write it up as a post on its own?

I think bots are a fact of life. Perhaps so much so that they ought to just be built-in to the system and integrated. No matter what algorithm you can come up with, someone will find a way to game it. The only way to win is not to play.

The way bots work is that they auto-upvote posts after 'x' delay from authors x, y, and z. (There may be other ways, but those are the ones I know about). What if you just say "the people I follow automatically get upvoted?" I dunno, maybe that makes the world worse.

The thing that worries me is that the number of ways to maliciously game curation awards is high, and the number of ways to do it relatively trivially is still pretty high.

I don't know the solutions for that, but you've definitely started me thinking.