I think your analysis is spot on: you can no longer find a group to upvote each others shitty content, because they can be broken down if the community sees it appropriate. The sudden influx of rewards I'm receiving, are coming a bit out of the blue for me, because I was used to the #oldsteem, haha, but it's nice to be rewarded, since I've been fairly consistent throughout the bear market with – not only creating – but also improving my content.

It is a turning point for those who've relentlessly been creating content all along, despite curation being discouraged.

Curation definitely makes sense under the new rules, I'm very encouraged to power up myself, too, and have been doing a lot of it lately :) Just have to hold my horses a little in order to not buy too much in single point of time – gotta just keep cost averaging with small amounts in regular intervals. Though it is getting very tempting to buy a slightly bigger slice now, because the price seems to have found a floor around 16 cents :P