It cuts both ways, though.
Clever bots selectively upvote posts knowing the author will self upvote either manually or with bid bots (often 6 days later).
Making curation more profitable relative to self upvoting will undermine this author behaviour and introduce some more ambiguity for bots.
As to consistently great authors, if the quality starts to slip, those manual votes aren't going to arrive, and the curation bots will be pointed elsewhere.
It'll just take a while to lose momentum.