As a matter of fact, curation guilds are curating posts across a very narrow band of topics. There's no hodgepodge of niche content, because as you say, a community this small does not support it. Every week, ~85-90% posts from Curie are in the top 5 categories/tags. A post about a niche or diverse topic is very rare. Steemit has naturally consolidated on a bunch of topics, and curation guilds only work to pick out the best among them.

A community of 1000 people can never be about all things to all people in the first place - that's clearly illogical - and there's nothing a curation guild can do to change that.

There are dozens of curators involved in Steemtrail and over a 100 weekly active curators submitting to Curie - around 25 daily active; not to mention 700 users in the channel. The curation community is a vital and thriving part of Steemit, as inclusive and engaged as Steemsports.

Activity is tied directly to the price of Steem, and we have seen a substantial increase in the last couple of weeks. Indeed, there have been many returning users who were ignored 3-4 months ago, gave up and left. Let's hope we can retain them this time. Personally, for me, that's the end goal of curation guilds - user retention and engagement. We lost thousands of users when the price was high and the community was only voting for a couple of dozen users - it's not an opportunity we can afford to lose again.

The proof is in the pudding - there are countless people who have said they'd have left Steemit were it not for curation guilds - each day there's at least a couple of comments to that effect on @curie's posts, all by different people.

Without curation guilds and other engaging initiatives like Steemsports, Steemit would be a barren wasteland of about a couple hundred people, and only a couple of dozen people who would be voted for over and over again.

Of course, there's scope for all kinds of initiatives on Steemit, and curation guilds should absolute be part of it; as should be Steemsports and many others.