"You're best earning from both YT and Steemit, as there are no downsides from doing so."
I'd have to disagree. A lot of us are here on Steemit/Dtube/dlive/dsound to escape the Youtubes and Facebooks. Posting on Youtube has the huge downside of supporting centralized platforms using datamined personal info to feed you ads.
I understand the inflation aspects of a 7 day period. But why lockout previous content from weekly curation rewards? Everyone's voting power is already limited by diminishing returns and daily recharges. So it's not going to thin out the prize pool overtime. This will only happen if everyone is using bots and not really reading/watching/listening to content and curating it.
I believe in the following solutions:
Ban voting bots like they are spammers. This is basically "lying" and is against the EOS constitution. Lying that you watched the video and found it useful, or read the article and found it informative. (Granted this is not EOS, but both platforms were worked on by Dan Larimer and were done in the same rebellious spirit).
Every 7 days the curation rewards start over. Previous content is not locked out of the curation rewards. A new up-vote will start a new 7 day curation period after the last one closed.
Keep the diminishing returns on multiple votes in a day, with daily power recharges.
Without these changes Steemit will be fraudulently curated with little incentive for long term content. It's more a replacement for twitter than long term platforms like Youtube and Facebook. I don't want whales choosing what's in my Feed anymore than I want Facebook datamining my personal info for that Feed.