RE: Regulating Curation on SteemIt
When counting readers one has to consider two groups: Readers with STEEM POWER and readers without. Most casual readers will not invest in STEEM POWER. Increasing the curation reward really does nothing for casual readers with little STEEM POWER. Their curation rewards will be at most a few pennies a week.
The audience you are looking at is people who want to invest in STEEM and who like curating, but don't like posting.
A better approach to this audience would be to create a program specifically for them. This could be done with with a SteemConnect app and delegation.
For example one might offer a matching delegation. This type of product would best be done through SteemConnect.
A person who wants to read without writing could say: I want to be a dedicated curator.
They would go to a busy.org clone that counts the articles that they read.
Steemit bloggers could delegate SP to a central account which would then give these dedicated readers a matching delegation. By matching delegation I simply mean that their delegation would increase as their SP increases. It would decrease if they powered down.
Creating a system that directly rewarded people for curating would do a better job rewarding curators than the 50/50 split. I might write this up as a new post.
You're right that the curation split won't (directly) attract readers who don't have Steem Power, but current incentives lean too heavily towards content creation, and not heavily enough towards content discovery. I believe that's part of the reason for the low engagement (unless one writes about Steem ;-). If voters do a better job at content discovery, it should draw uninvested readers as a 2nd-order effect.
Yes, there are a variety of possible third party work-arounds. But if we get the incentive structure right on the blockchain itself, then we shouldn't need third party hacks to make up for the deficiencies.