RE: Earning much better curation awards lately
You are absolutely correct.
I don't know what I'm getting per week on steem power etc for curation before, but most of the time I see a 1ct when I vote added. Note that I'm just a super small fish, only 2kSP. Also I see curation rewards in the double digit (ie 0.0xx) instead of the 0.001 I saw before. I even see my post rewards going up since dolphins and minnows voting brings me cents per vote instead of (almost) nothing.
I truly think the Whales are great in what they are doing at the moment! And I thank all of them for sharing their rewards with us.
However, this is not sustainable and a solution shall be found. But for now, lets run this 'experiment' followed by maybe more experiments of different sorts and types and let us give that enough information to decide how to progress Steemit, rewarding and power distribution and other things that are important to do for growth of the whole community, service etc.