maybe i am wrong, but it kinda depends on how are auto-voting set up. are they just set up to vote on some people or are they following a curation trail that does manual curation, or looks for new users, or whatever.
if there is no curation rewards (or significantly smaller ones), would not that make new accounts in even worse position? as now there are incentives for some people to look for new, interesting content and promote it, no incentives if no curation.

i do get that there is strong will up top to move social part rewards from lvl 1 and cutting hive rewards to authors and curators and pushing it to HMT tokens (or wherever) and this looks like the first step to it.