You could have been reading my mind, Angela! Or maybe I've been reading yours, because I've been thinking about the very same issue and even wrote an article about it.

I think both publications and curation are helpful for getting a wider audience. Publications have the benefit of a built-in subscriber base. Curation helps in getting the article out to people who indicated they are interested in the tags you've used on the article.

My guess is once your article's reached a certain momentum, the algorithm kicks in and promotes your article more widely such that publications or curation no longer matters as much in getting views. I've actually been running a few experiments in self-publication to test that scenario - of course, the danger is the article doesn't get curated and I end up with very limited distribution! Thankfully, that hasn't happened yet.