The initial model of Steem was about people having to buy Steem and powering it up, in order to influence the visibility of posts. This is obviously redundant with the introduction of delegations and bid-bots/vote-selling.

The reason why Steem isn't working out for authors isn't that they're not earning enough. Heck, even 25% (instead of 75%) would be a lot more than most people gain when writing on WordPress. It's sadly somewhat of entitlement, that people believe authors should earn the majority of the rewards, while stakeholders are most important in this system. There will always be people interested in earning money by writing, but will there be more @theycallmedan's, buying millions of Steem? That's rare.

Instead, the reason why authors are not flourishing on Steem(it), is simply because the eyeballs are missing. But even if more eyeballs were on Steem(it), the content discovery is awful, the comment section is buggy and slow once the amount of comments gets higher. Essentially, the Steemit.com website had been abandoned for more than a year. (people are now working on it, but we still don't have communities)

So, do I want to see 50/50? Of course - why not. If it doesn't work out, we'll change it back. But we've had the status quo for way too long.

But besides the curation-debate, the biggest problem we have right now is that there is not a common view of what Steem is and what it isn't. Usually, in centralized structures, the people in charge are taking take of that, but Steem is very decentralised in that area.