it seems a handful of curators get compensation and participants get exposure.

No, again, this is not true and it literally takes a few minutes to check that the authors do get more than just exposure and more rewards than the curators finding their posts.

It seems like you are only reading what you want to hear.

I'm not upset about people not understanding how it works. I do however get upset about the Project that I have created and spend a lot of time on combined with many others being called a scam. Especially since it was started after another Project took photos and content of others posts without asking permission and without even supporting the original posts with rewards.

I will take you up on your advice about explaining more in depth how it works to newcomers that can't figure out if they will get rewarded before they go pointing fingers that they are getting scammed.

I would've loved to see your reaction to being featured in the shady curation projects that I mentioned earlier, though.