I don't know about the primary, or inner circle of Curie folk but I am basically a Curie worker and I certianly don't get quite a lot. In fact, I'm excluded from curie payment. As a science curator, I get paid, but as you can tell by my wallet history, it ain't much, 50sbd a week, and some upvote rewards (but not by the curie train).

The ones we at steemSTEM give $100 to (using curie and steemstem together), are ones that we consider exceptional content. Most are given about $10-30. This is still for posts that are well referenced, original content, however.

But yeah your main point I can't so much comment on, I agree that it's not a problem per se, but if they're getting extraordinary payments, well, that's a shame but the curation work my teams doing has benefited supremely from curie's input so far, so I can't really complain!