Sorry, the solution of increasing curation rewards just doesn't make sense if what you want is more engagement.

Very few stakeholders are spending time looking for quality contributions to reward.

If you want this to happen you must link payout to engagement and for EVERYONE. Assign an engagment quotient. A perfect score would be 1. So if you want to obtain your payout and all of it, you need a perfect EQ. Your EQ is earned through varied engagement, that is not just with upvoting a handful of accounts. This means that if I use a bid-bot, I am only half way to getting a payout. Now I must engage on the platform and upvote various other people. Or in the very least upvote and engage with the comments on my post.

The solution of giving more in curation rewards will do NOTHING. No, probably the opposite of improving engagement. If I am only upvoting myself, do I care if it comes through author rewards or curating rewards. NO. I get curation rewards from upvoting my own posts too and the bulk of it if I am large account. This will not encourage engagement and will likely drive smaller accounts to blockchains that have the very system we used to have. And bidbots will now receive a larger share of curating rewards too.

Go back to the drawing board. Increasing curating rewards is not the solution.