Hey @abh12345 great write up and I think summarizing the panel discussion like this is really valuable - of course people can (and should!) listen to the whole thing but getting a snapshot of the talking points is great.

There may have been a slight misunderstanding of something I said here, RE the low, medium and high stakeholders voting on Curie witness decisions. I probably should have used the familiar terms minnow, dolphin and whale :) What I was trying to convey is that unlike most (all?) of the other top 20 witnesses, which are in fact high stake users (if not whales, big dolphins), many of the stakeholders who vote on Curie witness decisions are in fact minnows. I think minnows as a group have very little representation on Steem blockchain and I wanted to point out that the Curie community witness does in fact include minnows in the decision making process. All Curie top curators, reviewers and operators have an equal vote in witness decisions regardless of SP. (what I hope the words I said in the interview did NOT convey was that there are different tiers of importance within the Curie voting hierarchy - as there are none, it is a straight democracy with equally weighted votes).

I would also love to address @crimsonclad's point. I think it is a valid point for many authors that they may still not have the following needed to support consistent earning from posting despite hitting REP 60 or thereabouts. I personally think there is room for more curation efforts on Steem blockchain. But it is not the case that Curie ignores authors of higher REP completely, despite the focus on rewarding newer or "undiscovered" authors. @abh12345 you asked if I had any stats on this, so I ran a query :)

@crimsonclad you may in fact be surprised to learn that in the past 30 days Curie has upvoted 1152 posts by authors with REP 60+. Many of these have come through the sub-communities that Curie supports and through the direct follow curators (I did not cover this in the show but Curie curators who maintain an extremely high curation score for 6 consecutive months earn a "direct follow" from Curie meaning they can upvote posts through Curie with no review process). The sum total of pending and post payout for these posts in past 30 days is 33558.943 Steem token units (or whatever you want to call the units displayed as pending and post payout - supposedly SBD but obviously not when SBD peg is failing).

Here is the complete list of all posts upvoted by Curie in past 30 days with authors of REP 60+:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f4AEfLUALGmU8nfOteWPvTbUJN8JO4Gdl4V3E3xwyC4/edit?usp=sharing (the SQL query used is also included at that link)

Cheers - Carl