good post! we need posts like this to discuss the future of the Hive platform and make it better. I definitely feel similar to you: the 5 min curation window is something that needs to change; and your analysis of the situation that this prevents real engagement when coupled with autovotes seems very true as well.

I am open for change (as it is the only constant) and would like to see things get experimented with. How do we do that? Could we have a sort of "beta Hive platform" where we test these things (as it wouldn't be a good idea to do HFs and then undo them again)?

While I understand the case against autovotes, I am also somewhat in favor of them as I see it as a sort of pledge of support to an author (who may not always deliver the same quality of posts). I am daily distributing my votes to 80+accounts (a lot of them minnows) and I feel that this is making a bit of an impact. If we had more dolphins and orcas do this (and of course whales) we would probably end up with almost all users (subtracting abusers) getting some sort of meaningful rewards. Manual curation on top of that could then bring out the really good posts as well.

To me it seems that the Steem experiment (that Ned once talked about) to find the best way to reward "good" content has largely failed. The reason seems to be monetization: if things are about money, it would seem to be human nature to try and maximize profits. But this behavior does not bring about top quality content, but is essentially self rewarding and leads to circle voting and empowers only a handful of users. @therealwolf made a post about this some time ago and argued that we would need to switch to a voting system based on user votes (like on FB or other social media platforms) and distribute rewards based on the amount of stake one has (I think). Would this work any better? I think we need a lot of suggestions and time to figure things out. And as long as the community thinks and debates about these issues it seems to me that answers can be found...