I hope so, too.

I think the main point here is actually to incentivize people to curate thoughtfully. Curation rewards cannot be directly taken away like author rewards can. But if the profitability of upvote spam is reduced sufficiently, then those who engage in it may stop doing it and end up autovoting a much smaller number of authors. In that case, it is likely that the ones receiving the autovotes will be chosen better. Front running bid bots is already less profitable than it used to be because posts bid botted excessively come under heavy fire in #newsteem.