Ned gives a talk in the beginning and then speaks a panel for quite a while. It's great info. I used the 10 second skip ahead button a lot to get to the english parts.

Yea, I was really interested to hear him talk about his vision. He answered a lot of questions I had in my own mind for the future or Steemit. He also mentioned the "super linear rewards curve" This lines up to your good point about being rewarded as curators. It sounds like it will be shifting towards rewarding people who vote on content first, get the biggest reward.
Now some speculation:
I would guess that the number of votes per day would need a cap. Let's just say 10 votes per day per account. Then curators would need to be careful to only vote on the very best content. If they were using bots, their bot may waste the 10 votes on sub-par content. So real curators would have an incentive.

I love the analogy of "local communities". It's true. I interact with people on Steemit, who I would want to be around in the real world. That's definitely different from my Twitter account. It's a special thing about Steemit that shouldn't be lost. Ned's north star seems to be curating content with cryptocurrency incentives. His main goal is to find a way to sort the best content towards the top. He will keep tweaking the algo to make that happen.

You make a great point that retention is a big part of it. I was recently a little discouraged with the overall state of the platform. I felt the shift you mentioned away from community, content, and curation and towards gaming the system. I would imagine a lot of others felt the same. I've been more optimistic lately because the community stepped up and slowed the spam. It's constantly changing. I'm happy to know Ned's vision and that he's going to continue to tweak Steem to help it thrive. It was really interesting to hear him talk about the SMT's as an experiment ground for changes we may use on Steemit someday.

Yosemite was wonderful. I did ice water dips in crystal clear ponds under waterfalls. I just freaking loved it. That place is stunning. Nature and moving water is energizing for the soul as you know very well @surfermarly Cheers