Yeah, all the difficulty will be in finding a middle ground between optimizing curation rewards and discovering new content.
Don't want to be pessimistic, but from my point of view, they're incompatible.

For example, when OCD discovers new content, it in fact only profits to anomadsoul, which front-runs the votes from ocd, ocd-witness and ocdb with his "triggering" account cameraman.
The only other people making curation rewards from content "discovered" (upvoted) by OCDB are "lucky voters" who casted their votes before, or insiders (I don't know how they work really, but I suppose the person who suggested the post). In fact I suppose most of those "lucky voters" are in fact the "insiders" or at least partly.

Sure, the vote from tipu (around 1$) might give the post some spotlight and trigger votes after it (if it arrives in the hot section for example), but I wouldn't overestimate that effect.

For me you said it all here

good authors that create valuable content to be rewarded, even if it's done by voting circles

If you want good return on curation rewards, you will need to study the voting circles and vote at the right time, or front-run all the tipu votes with your cardboard account (in that case, you'll become a great performing curator, like anomadsoul is :D )
If you don't care about curation rewards, you can start "discovering content"

As Tipu is a business with delegators behind, that's why I would separate both activities which, are, as I said, in my opinion incompatible :

• An optimized curation system to ensure a good return to delegators,
• An open curation initiative to allow people to curate with higher votes, with high turnover among curators to really allow new authors to be curated / discovered