5-minute penalty: I doubt that makes much of a difference
I'm sorry, but this says more about your understanding than you know. It made a MASSIVE difference.

It was the primary incentive for dispersion, and the primary anti-stagnation mechanic. It was the bunker-buster for autovotes, the only reason I ever had to check on anything, update anything, or think about anything.

I expect autovoting to become even more prevalent once people notice the changes, and I expect closed-circuit circlejerking to become twice as common if the possibility of higher curation returns are "fixed". Meanwhile an entire week of posts were flagged as curation-forfeited and anyone aware has been profiting enough to completely negate any detriment they might incur. I literally voted down the list of top payouts like a checklist to get higher % returns than anyone that has ever done real curation.

Just because something needs to be changed in order to be improved, doesn't mean changing it is an improvement by default. I can't say for certain if the overall picture is better or worse since so much of it is sentiment-based and depends on the nature of people involved, but from my perspective that is the only advantage of the change - sentiment.

scale of 1 to 10 to give a larger or smaller vote
You can already scale voting weight, and most UI will show this as a slider once you reach 500 or 1000 HP, because otherwise it's splitting dust.

however, this notion:
value of the vote is irrelevant to the voter's HP
is complete nonsense, because anyone can make 1000+ accounts.
anything done to help "the little guy" also helps "the bot army".
maybe you meant something else by that, I'm not sure.

as for where you get your information from
a 6-digit number of votes has given me a little experience.