The curation penalty for voting early should be changed somewhat.

I completely agree. The way things are now, curators might be scared off by the penalty, which means they wait a few minutes to upvote a post. By then, the post is so far down the feed, never to be seen again, that the author misses out on a lot of eyes on their post. That's because people are more eager to check out a post with some upvotes already in place (though reputation plays a big role there too).

At the same time, increasing the curation reward pool and decreasing the post reward one would activate more authors to start voting.

I think that's a really good point. It might help people who don't earn a lot with their posts to re-think their strategy and start upvoting more. Actually, maybe it would even get rid of some crap posts in our feed, because these people will be upvoting, instead of posting... Or is that wishful thinking?