I tend to unpublish the ones that I thought sucked after the fact so I can take another stab at it. That's probably a factor.

I've had a couple of months with 100% curation rate, which blew my mind a little. But mostly it's hit and miss. When I write about Medium, no go.

You hit on a big one for a lot of writers, which is passive writing. That and hard to read or long sentences. I tend towards short sentences for easier reading. It seems to help. That's a process I had to learn, too. I guess we all do.

Incidentally, do you keep the emails they send when a story is curated? I've had other writers say that when their stories got un-curated, they just emailed the original curation to Medium and they reinstated it. Might be worth a try?

I can see how there might be some terrible curation. Mostly, I think they get it right, but they're human too. Likely lots of exceptions to that.

Hope you're well in these crazy times. :)