I'm not sure how these proposed changes will actually pan out in practice. What's being described here seems to be an oversimplification of how the voting window works and it may be skewing how we're thinking about the potential benefits and upside. I really hope I'm thinking accurately here because as far as I'm aware the blockchain still operates on the "reverse auction" model for that curation window. If that's in error please someone correct me!

No one gets "bonus" curation rewards for voting within 5 minutes. In fact the rewards are still penalized based on how close to the post's creation you vote. If you vote after one minute, you forfeit 80% of your curation rewards back to the pool. The only reason this can become more profitable and seem like a bonus is because of those auto voters who play the reverse auction game well. Vote soon enough to be ahead of the majority of incoming votes and large whale votes, but don't vote so early that you relinquish all of those profits to the early voting penalty.

For the large whale accounts, curation projects, etc., the window doesn't matter much. Unless they're sure another whale is going to follow on behind them, they're not getting much more curation reward from the $1.00 of votes that follows after they've dropped a $20.00 vote. Big accounts by nature have a harder time achieving outsize curation rewards because the chance of large amounts of additional stake voting behind them is small. They already exist much closer to a plain linear curation rewards model.

Small accounts by contrast have much more variance in their curation earnings. If no one follows their vote, they'll get nothing, while if a whale lands after them they may see 100%+ curation returns on that vote.

So what does an expansion of the curation window do? With the proposed change to a "flat" distribution during the expanded window it essentially creates a very linear system. If everyone who votes in that first 12-24 hours basically counts as having voted at the same time, they'll only earn the curation as we know it today on votes coming in later, which for all intents and purposes will probably be pretty negligible. Otherwise they simply get back half of their vote value. This will probably work better for large accounts who were getting "frontrun" regularly under the old system, and worse for very small accounts who will see most of their curation rewards dusted off and not have the chance at those "lucky strikes."

Now, I'm not against this, but I'd rather just remove the complication of the de facto system that I feel like it'll become and do away with the vote window entirely, and switch to flat rewards for curating. If you use 10% of your voting power a day, you'll always get the exact same return on those votes. It's a participation & activity bonus that goes a step beyond applications that'll throw some tokens your way for a daily login.

While the fact that this "participation reward" is completely content agnostic may seem worrying, the hope would be that a curation reward system that doesn't have any way to "game" it for increased ROI could actually lead to organic curation. Liking what you like gets you the same return as liking what you're guessing should be popular. Liking things on any traditional social media right now is completely content agnostic. I don't get any more or less for liking a picture of a kitten, a political post, or an esoteric review of a 1940's record. Combined with the continued presence of the downvote pool which has worked out well overall, my vote wouldn't be for a longer window; it'd be to just simplify and flatten the whole curation process. Bonus is that I imagine this could potentially simplify blockchain calculations as well. Perhaps the freed up processing overhead could be used to making the actual 1 week payout window longer or indefinite.