While you can vote on one thing or another thing, voting on things you have a pretty good expectation of being valuable does increase the curation reward. In that sense, this experiment does create an incentive for people to participate purely for the curation rewards, but I guess the same can be said for voting up any other popular author with a history of high value posts.
I wonder if the inflated price of SBD is being done specifically to inflate the rewards pool for the advantage of those earning through the rewards pool. In a way, inflating the SBD price may push the opposite experiment of what is happening with this post by giving more value out as a way to fix lopsided initial distribution concerns. I'm personally not too concerned about it because all of that SBD is still only convertible to STEEM at the $1 price and because few would do that now anyway. You make a good point that a larger rewards pool doesn't automatically mean it will be distributed fairly. It could, as you said, cause even more unequal distribution.
Maybe more visibility via tools like this may be helpful: https://steemdb.com/labs/author
RE: Steem experiment: Burn post #1