The balance or perfect equilibrium will probably never be exactly pinpointed. However, I agree with your views and also those of the mentioned whales. Right now, we expect every non-whale Steemian to be a content creator, since blogging creates the biggest rewards at the moment.

However, human behavior on other blog platforms is different, there is more 'lurking' and silent upvoting. And that would be the normal situation here as well, I would think. So incentivizing good curation (for example by settings the rewards at 50/50 split) would be a natural way to reduce the amount of low quality posts and promote good curation. When you are incentivizing behavior with monetary rewards, you will usually get the behavior that's most rewarded.

Don't get me wrong, Steem as it is promotes and challenges everyone to be as creative as possible. Steem got me to try blogging for the first time in my life, to code a little bit, to try out photoshop and is now challenging me to write songs and perform them on camera. Stepping out of your comfort zone can be scary, but this incentive on trying creative things is really awesome. And yes, compared to artists that dominate other parts of the internet, my content is actually pretty crappy. I probably won't ever get 100K viewers on a youtube channel or anything like that, so for me it's cool that Steem is what it is right now.

But, I still feel that although I have explored quite some activities here, I still haven't done the one thing that would really contribute massively to the quality of the content here: CURATION. I have very little SP and it simply isn't rewarding, compared to the time it would consume. Especially with the amount of mediocre content here, it's a long, tedious and tiresome chore. The real heroes of this platform are the curators in my view, so anything that enhances good curation is something I would support whole-heartedly.

Sorry for the long comment. But hey, at least I read your post first :)