Anybody that can't give a 20 hive vote, or votes on a post that doesn't reach ~6hbd in payout, is giving their vote's value to the trending page, and the curators that put content there.

This is a bit not true, while you're right that those who vote on say, comments or posts that don't make it to (I think it's 16 hive rewards (both hbd+hp), give it up and it goes back to the pool, you saying it's going to curators who put stuff on trending isn't exactly true. The curation curve right now is also punishing those who vote bigger votes, if you've checked some front-runners and maximizes, you'll notice that most will vote with very tiny percentages on popular posts they know will get past the threshold, but then you have the bigger accounts who'll try to vote first on posts with very low rewards if they themselves (or with the accounts in their possession) can get the post to just pas the threshold. Voting it more than that might actually cost them ROI. This is something that's been bothering me lately, cause when I see posts that are in great length, quality and effort and deserve to be trending, I'll know that if I cast it a say 100 hive vote, most of that 84 hive will not be giving me great returns than say if I had cast 5x 20 hive votes instead. Another thing to notice is that these maximizers will skip posts that have even 0.50$+ votes on them already because that means they'll have to share the returns of that post with those smaller accounts that voted first and not get the best returns. As someone who doesn't usually care about the returns that much but wants to see great content on trending, it's really annoying when you have to still vote on great posts even though you know that some abuse front-runners have autovoted on it first and your bigger votes will not only cost you a lot in ROI but also reward the maximizers more, just so the authors keep creating great content and trending will continue to be diverse and of quality. That was kind of my only pet peeve with your initial comment I quoted so figured I'd let you know about this in case you weren't aware of it and if you appreciate curation projects that aren't all about ROI I'd love it if you gave our witness account - @ocd-witness a vote. :)