Just to be clear upfront:
No matter how the distribution and curation systems will or will not be changed, I think voting is and will always be key to this platform. This said, it is a logic consequence that those who have (and those who manage) voting power have a huge responsibility and impact on the "face" of steemit. I strongly believe that those who invested in this platform so far, are more than aware of that. And I also believe that careful voting has to be and should be rewarded. I try to be very short now...
The matter:
Most people react not by logic, but by feelings and these days there was a lot of discussion and "bad blood" about guild voting. Among others there is Ned providing his Steempower to guilds, so that good content of qualified posts can be rewarded THIS IS GREAT. (I earlier questioned the rules, but that is beside the point now)
As I understand it, the benefit should be:
- good and steady posting should be rewarded to motivate further good content
- those providing their SP get rewarded with nice curation rewards
The problem:
Good work has to be paid. For the moment it seems that the actual payment is a regularly allowed selfvote for the guild members. This of course distorts the purpose of the whole project. "Intelligent" bots even make this distortion much worse, because it is VERY predictable that guild members get a whale vote almost for sure on a regular base. Additionally (and I did not see this point in any other post yet) The guild members "know" where the whale vote will hit, which gives an enormous advantage and represents an additional "payment" by the possibility of prevoting on posts that will get whalevotes.
This leaves a lot of steemians (myself included) with a strange gut feeling of injustice.
A possible solution:
(I limit this to neds case, because I was too lazy to calculate it for the whole thing)
At the moment ned alone gets about 600 Steempower / week for curation, which is for a big percentage not made by himself. This means every vote brings ned about 1 SP on average. Why not give a % of the gained curation rewards as "payment" like the service of biophil does it (at least I guess so). This would imho bring a justified payment to the designated curators (If those in charge at the moment will not do it for so little reward, I am sure there will be found some). The relations to the steemprice and the active accounts would be much more reasonable and finally probably more SP holders could be persuaded not to let lay fallow their SP holdings (= leave VP unused). Last but not least it would be a transparent way of rewarding the efforts of the steemguilds which much less induces the feeling of injustice for apparently most of the users here on STEEM.
Probably this kind of "payment" could easily be performed by a bot calculation (calculate for week x the amount of steempower generated by following trigger account xyz, exclude votes with %y and send amount to z)
If one day (and I still hope so) we will reach mass adoption this kind of service could be a very lucrative one. We do not need a selfprotecting and selfgratulating civil service, but we need instead involved users, caring about growing this platform to the level it deserves.
PS: Personally besides my own manual voting, I let my VP (by bot, yes) follow 
