I guess its more about me wondering if this consistency and survival game is an effective way to grow a chain and foster retention.

You have to distinguish between individual curators and projects, in this including projects funded through DHF.

But if you want to know how to fix retention, you need to look at the root of the problem, and that is onboarding. You need to see why people are joining and what's their intention.

As long as onboarding is focused on underdeveloped countries, where people are struggling to survive and would literally do anything for a penny or two, this is what you get. When the onboarder's strongest argument is "you can be financially rewarded", it's a lost case from the start as you're never going to get more than extractors and the only way you can retain these users is to feed them endlessly, regardless of their behavior. Stop voting them and they leave the next second. Simple as that.