it was meant to discourage self voting which is a non issue.

You keep saying this and I keep thinking you're missing something. How can you know it's a non-issue when the curve is currently dis-incentivizing it? If we made the curve linear (what you call "removing" the curve, which is also very confusing), a whale could come along and spam empty posts to the blockchain, upvote all of them, and receive a vastly higher reward than they would in the current system. Your answer is to downvote, but why hack the solution when we can bake it into the algorithms?