I've had similar ideas like you a while ago, like the one to empower good curators with more Steem Power, I have posted about it though it did not catch much attention. Since then I have been thinking of what I can do to help instead of relying on somebody else to help for the solution, one of the reasons that I actually started writing my own bot to help curation.

My curator bot is trying to encourage new authors making good content instead of favoring authors with already established reputation like some of the Whale bots apparently do. Before starting to work on a curation bot I was curating very actively every day, pretty much going through most of the new posts every day... unfortunately one cannot do that every day or a very long period of time... that is unless it is all you do. Going through a lot of posts every day does take a lot of time , though you also find some good things and learn a lot in the process.

The problem can only be solved by having a lot of active curators with sufficient voting power, so that the normal users that post interesting stuff will not have to rely on Whale votes at all. Unfortunately there is no way that this can happen overnight it will take a lot of time for things to reach some equilibrium, unless there is some significant change helped by those with a lot of power on Steemit (that is probably not going to happen).

The good news is that there are more and more initiatives forming with the idea to help and support normal users that contribute good and useful content to the platform...