There have been a lot of talks about redoing rep, but it's really difficult as there isn't valuable metrics. Votes are financially motivated and usually poorly executed, follows is a good option but would easily be abused if used, same with page views, content quality isn't really usable and subjective. Most things are easily bypassed by just making a second account. So while we have and hate Reputation, and it's been talked about being replaced many times, I don't see anything changing.
Steem UA was suppose to fix it, but it was flawed from the start as it was just a poor execution of Google Page Rank poisoned by using Witness votes as the seed.
RE: Hive curation - are things starting to go too far?