I think you are confused with some of the basic terms of this blockchain and it should not be the case with someone who is one of top 20 witness.
Proof-of-Brain was supposed to be manual human engagement but all you can see is curation sniping and automated votes.
If an account is manually voting then how can you say its a bot??
You do currently have 800k HP, why not make start making a difference yourself by manually voting yourself? I would say your voting pattern is similar to a bot because you mostly follow trails.
Only curation snipers are able to maximize their rewards and I think you know this better from Smartsteem days. By curating manually, you can just barely reach to break-even.
Why should anyone contribute and encourage curation sniping and automated effort by voting after them? Imagine If everyone start to do the exact same thing, things would be more worse. It is still better to promote newbies than to maximize rewards from popular authors, you know very well its easy to do so.
I think the main problem is automation(curation snipers who try to maximize their reward by voting at 3-4 minutes). Just try to ban automated votes and you'll see actual curation and more organic engagement. You might have noticed it in first two weeks when Hive was born. We all were able to see how popular authors were just like anyone else and organic votes were more real.
I see you have your own reason to follow some good trails and you are not one of the curation snipers but there are some people in top 20 who only curation snipe all day and just maximize their rewards on personal account by delegated stake, which the main problem.
RE: Can Hive scale under its current reward distribution mechanism to millions of users?