What are your thoughts on the $225 in curation rewards on this post for those who support this project? Does that incentivize people to be involved, even if it ends up being worse in the long run for the platform?
I think curation rewards mostly just incentivize people to participate in voting at all (which may be good or bad, depending on your point of view, but I think mostly good). You can vote on one thing and get curation rewards or vote on another thing and get curation rewards, so with respect to the content itself, they're mostly neutral. It doesn't make a lot of sense to argue that people vote for post A over post B 'for the curation rewards' when curation rewards are available from either (or countless other posts too).
Which is why declined-reward posts, and downvoting, can be disadvantaged: in that case it is not neutral, since they don't pay curation rewards it requires the voter choosing to deploy a vote in that manner to incur an opportunity cost. This is really a poor design choice, though I don't know of a good way to address it for downvotes (in the case of payment-declined posts, I think voters should get the normal curation rewards for their contribution in helping establish the visibility of the post, and also to restore content neutrality to the voting).
If the rewards pool is decreased via burning, won't that further entrench those who already have a disproportionate amount of STEEM either by increasing the price of STEEM and/or decreasing the rewards pool which might distribute STEEM more broadly?
First of all, let's make clear that the reward pool is currently inflated by about 3-6x (depending on rapidly-fluctuating market prices) due the actions of SBD speculators (and deficiencies in the SBD pegging mechanism). We would have to reduce rewards through burning by at least 65-85% just to restore the system to its original design parameters on how much stake should be distributed via rewards. That is highly unlikely, and with far less being burned, this is hardly entrenches anything, it just distributes at a less artificially accelerated rate.
Beyond that point on magnitude, it depends how much of the reward pool you believe is currently being allocated in a wasteful manner that doesn't really help the distribution (such as the self voting your mentioned as well as various ways that reward distribution). IMO if that is a large portion then we are better off taking a 'pause' on paying out maximum (inflated) rewards inefficiently and instead return some of that value to the STEEM price (and SBD peg health) until those problems are being better addressed either via the community or platform changes.
As much one might wish for some outcome such as 'better distribution', the mere act of paying rewards doesn't necessarily do that unless it is being done effectively. If a lot is being siphoned off by relatively well off whales and scammers, it is conceivable it could be making the distribution worse, and even if it isn't quite that bad, distribution is only one consideration. If value isn't being added then the rewards are wasteful and making both the platform and its stakeholders worse off.
I liked this post from @transisto on the matter of what rewards are supposed to accomplish: @transisto/my-version-of-steem-is-not-content-based-it-is-contribution-based
Let's ask ourselves whether it is even possible, or likely, for the community given its current size and activity level to be making contributions that are adding value of $500K-1M per day, or if the gap between what is being paid out and what is feasible to really effectively use is too large (leading to a proportionately larger share of self-serving schemes and other waste). In that context, a little tapping on the brakes is warranted. I respect that you may disagree and want to vote elsewhere.
RE: Steem experiment: Burn post #1