No the cold hard reality is that new people will loose interest before they even know how it all works.

We can't know this until we've seen how things play out. But I agree that it is a fair concern that smaller users, communities, and comments in general may suffer.

However, stakeholders can choose to avoid this if they want. We for instance build our curation system on Hive account@steempress to add support behind a large number of curation projects. So that smaller users who write original content and get engagement from others can quite easily reach 20 Steem in total post rewards.

Speaking for Steem in general, a lot rests on the assumption that a significant amount of the stake currently delegated to bid bots will go back towards manual curation, as well as downvotes returning rewards from vote farmers to proper users.