I am a bit late on this and relatively neutral on the matter.
Nevertheless, curation should be based on quality of content and not based on delegations, that was the whole point of @acidyo, as I understood it.
E.g. the initial idea of curation on Hive was in a nutshell that the better the content, the higher the votes and this incentivizes the creation of good content.
You wrote a long post, but didn´t comment on the fact that all those delegations and return votes are not aligned to this basic concept and in fact distort it.