Thing is that this race ends at some point, it's game theory that has been discussed quite a few times. Say a very popular and consistent author would start seeing front-runners front-running the front-runners until the very early votes are so early that the penalty doesn't make it worth the returns.

Hmm, your 2nd idea would discourage content discovery which is why the curve exists in the first place. The problem is people get lazy and not many check the "new" of all posts, with communities it is getting better as more curators are focusing on their own communities and being able to not miss many posts. This is also why we want to focus on bringing more niche communities up the ranks with our curation efforts of OCD so that newcomers that join don't post outside of communities but have a big variety to choose from early on and find their "place".

@reward.app does balance out the early voting a little bit and we could experiment some more with how the "extra" curation rewards are calculated to discourage early voters a bit more. I think with the EIP but with 25/75 this experiment would've worked better as it would've given us a bigger range to work with to switch up how we distribute curation but that's out of our control right now.

If anything it will add some more simulations and testing to new parameters to maybe help in a future hardfork if we come up with better solutions for content discovery. There's a lot of other pros to it and that's a big reason I decided to go forward with it but I understand the skepticism at first glance.