if we agree that curation on Steem isn’t currently working well, it seems that one obvious potential solution is to reward curators better for curating better while at the same time reducing the incentive for authors to self-vote bad posts.

curation on Steem isn’t currently working well, simply, because no one here READ a flying thing beyond the headline of the posts. Especially, if what they primarily are hunting for is Profits from Curation Rewards. Yeah! that's the flip side of the coin when what prevails here is the "Money Talks" slogan.Well my esteemed @blocktrades, in my not so humble opinion, I say:

That slogan only encourages the blind and illiterate ¿Curation? of those who claim not to have time to create content and they also flaunt large & deep pockets exclusively.

but then we would be left with the same problem it was meant to prevent: immediate voting on new posts by bots.

I've written about this problem many times before. And from my perspective, the eventual solution could even be much much simpler than it may be seem at first glance. In my view, there is no need whatsoever to replace the 30 minute period with a 5 minute period. Or for that matter, not even establish any waiting period at all to vote a post. Nor restore 50/50 rewards nor anything like that.

In my not so humble opinion, all that is needed for the platform to flourish and survive, is to have more people who actually READ. That they are forced, reinforced and obliged to READ before they are able or can take any other further action.

For example, it would be enough to establish that there was no way possible or procedure available for someone to vote a post. Unless they first click on the title of the post, wait until the post to unfold completely in their browsers and only after that, have they read the post or not, only after that, that's when the damn vote button will appear at the bottom on the post. I mean, that there is no voting button available anywhere outside of the body within the post. In this way, at least a large part of the problems would disappear. Like the meaningless votes casted by blind Trails, Guilds, Bots and all those nefarious species of AI automatisms from outside.

¿Do you wanna make money? ¡YOU HAVE TO READ! ¿Do you wanna Curation rewards? ¡YOU MUST READ! ¿Do you wanna make any sort of rewards? ¡YOU MUST MANUALLY AND HUMANLY ACT ACCORDINGLY!

¿Steemit is not about a social network? With Living Human Beings participating within it? Then, ¡You Have To Read!

I have no doubt, that only then would we see a similar figure between the Amount of Views vs the Amount of Votes.

"We need to stimulate Organic Human Interaction and systematically disfavors Automated Behaviours"

This, obviously, still does not solve the problem of the self-votes applied to their own shitposts of those in jerk circles with High SP and Deep Pockets. But in any case, if applying what I mentioned before, it will always be easier to identify those who do so and flag/downvote the crap out of them If necessary. At least, there will be fewer problems to solve and from somewhere we'll have to start to alleviate this ill-fated illiterate illness... }:)