We have the possibility to set beneficiaries for author rewards for some time now. Perhaps since hardfork 19, but I'm not sure.
I'm not sure how many people actually use it individually. But some dApps use it and made it their business model (to keep a part of the author rewards from their content creators to partially cover business expenses).
But it can be useful to share the author rewards between several authors, when more than one author was involved in creating the content.
Or to give them away to a specific account (like a donation), rather than collecting them yourself and sending the rewards afterwards (or rather than refusing the payment).
If the dApp you use for posting allows you to set default beneficiaries for the author rewards, you can even do that as a rule. SteemPeak does.
But what about curation rewards? Currently there's no way to set beneficiaries for them, as far as I know.
But what if a big stake holder, who is an active curator, would like to give away automatically his curation rewards for a week to a cause/special steemian who he wants to support?
Curation can be automated, and almost everyone has some level of automated curation. Even if most of the curation is done manually. What if you go on vacation and during that time you want to give the curation rewards to someone else?
That's different than sending a bulk amount of STEEM at once to a person, especially a newcomer. Seeing the flow of curation rewards from a bigger account on his account, as they arrive on the source account gives the newcomer the "feel" of what it means to be in a bigger stakeholder's shoes. And hopefully they'll want to get there. I believe few newcomers have their eyeballs set on the blockchain activity of big accounts. And they will be blown away, in most cases. The person who offers his account experience (in terms of curation rewards) to the newcomer doesn't really have to be whale. An active dolphin would probably do even better.
And here's another possible reason. Curation rewards are SP only. To transfer them to another account they need to be powered down first. What if you want to have a different account where you want to build up the SP than the one you are active on (for security reasons, as another layer)?
This last option would also have some barriers if you delegate to projects which upvote your posts/comments based on your delegation (more or less). There's no way I know to delegate from an account where you build up your SP and receive upvotes on the account where you are active (different than the one from where you delegate SP).
Here's another situation. I know @steeveapp uses a workaround to collect a percent of your upvote given to one of their recommended posts (creates a comment and Steeve app is 100% beneficiary, and you upvote that comment with a fraction of the weight you initially used - I believe it's 5%). Would setting a beneficiary for the curation rewards offer the same business model in this case, but with less clutter to the blockchain (which is now forced as a workaround)?
Can you identify more reasons why we should be able to add beneficiaries for curation rewards as well?
How about reasons against this?