The obvious solution would be a change in culture of Steem from greed and hubris to one more appropriate for a social platform. This can happen with whales and influencers supporting the right message.

Back to reality, I'd be in favour of returning to 50/50 and doing away with the 30 minute window entirely if the curation rewards system is overhauled to incentivize actual curation. I don't know how that can happen, but here's a thought experiment.

I'd like to see a more intelligent rewards system that would more effectively reward curators curating a diversity of posts. This would include two things. To be clear, this is just a thought experiment, and I'm fairly sure it's too complicated to be implemented -

a) a cubic curation reward curve, so discoverers are more effectively incentivized.
b) diminishing returns on voting for the same authors over and over again.

E.g. account a has X SP, account b has X SP (identical). They vote in identical ways. Except, account a only votes on b, c, and d; while account b votes on 100 different accounts. Account b will end up with 30Z SP rewards, while account a ends up with only Z SP.

This could follow the VP algorithm maybe, each account will have a VP for each voter. However each vote could cost 50%, and regen period could be a week, for example. So, voting on the same author more than once a week would be disincentivized versus voting on a diverse variety of authors.

Of course, this can be abused by SP delegation. However, the 7 day in limbo should be an effective deterrent. Furthermore, SP delegations can be tracked back to the source, and the diminishing returns would continue. However, I don't think that's necessary until additional abuse vectors are found.

Needless to say, this is computationally challenging. I'm not a developer, so I'll leave that up to them to decide whether it's worth it. Most likely, this is way too complicated and not feasible, but it's a nice thought experiment.

The end result is, of course, this would also greatly disincentivise self-voting, vote trading, auto bot voting etc. The challenge here would be rogue curators will spread around random votes to cash in, making networks of sock-puppet accounts. However, one hopes that with a cubic reward curve, they will be greatly incentivized to curate good content others can discover. And, hey, their abuse is rampant anyway today.