We actually had 50/50 split for quite a while and it wasn't bad. In fact, from what I saw, many problems resulted from this supposed minor change that was made at the time.
It's important to keep in mind that all rewards in some sense come from stakeholders who put a value on steem by wanting to hold it. The current broken curation system makes Steem look less attractive to investors, lowering the value of steem, which directly lowers the amount of actual reward that authors receive (the amount distributed through the reward pool is a linear relationship to the market cap of steem).
In other words, I believe that returning back to 50/50 will actually increase the total value of rewards paid to authors, by helping to fix the curation problem that currently stunts steem's value in the market.