I’ve often talked about a desire for a resteem with comment feature. You’re absolutely right that the higher curation rewards give resteems more use in maximizing curation, but I’ve advocated taking it a step further.
Any kind of comment is going to necessitate a new “post” as far as the blockchain logic goes I believe. So I’d like to see a system that auto sets the author of the resteemed post as a substantial beneficiary.

So if I resteem this post with a comment it actually creates a new top level post with the referenced post embedded. Any votes my commented resteem gathers are split between me and you, perhaps 30/70 resteem/original author?

The major benefit to a system like this is that it creates “evergreen” content. An undiscovered gem that’s 6 months old could be found, shared, go “viral” and get 50 more resteems... and suddenly that author has 51 pending payouts from their 6 month old content. Or a well crafted tutorial may get a steady share or two each week as someone drops it in their own feed letting their followers know how useful it was. It takes no more blockchain resources than someone dropping a comment under the post and tagging a friend, but it rewards the original content author.

Curation also takes on a whole new aspect, as resteeming becomes a whole new field of curation. Well curated “magazine” style accounts could do well for themselves while the system auto pays out to the content creators they’re building around. The system would have to be largely self policing, as with all things Steem as resteem spammers would be unfollowed or outright downvoted.

I think an innovative front end like SteemPeak would be a logical place to try something like this out, as it really could be just an automated UI component with no underlying blockchain changes.