People tend to forget that things can never be perfect. They can only be as good as the system and other conditions let them be. I think most of the problems you mentioned is not curie's fault, but Steemit platform's. Being under beta, it is still far from being user-friendly and killing projects like curie will only bring something new in that open spot... and all of it will start from the beginning. If there were simple options like declining to be shown on trending, it would make more sense to me.
As for "draining the reward pool"... I cannot understand this argument. Would people rather see whales with no time just not voting at all and awarding no one? I, myself, would like to see whales reading every single post and curating on their own, but life just does not work like that.
IMO, curie is a great project. It can be improved of course, but shutting it down would only bring more losses than gains. It was a good boost for me during my first weeks on steemit as well!
That's my 2 cents I guess. Whenever you have something big, you have to be prepared to adapt accordingly to the situation. Good luck with that!