The entire curation system on Hive when you think about it makes very little sense and is just too ridiculous for words. It's all about (auto) upvoting posts that get close to reaching the linear reward curve (big accounts) since your upvotes are literally worth more on those and/or upvoting posts where you know more votes will come in later on. Also giving full votes tends to bring about higher curation rewards.

Doing anything else will pretty much kill your curation rewards. I recently restructured my own auto-upvotes pretty much removing all support to really small guys and my yearly curation appreciation is increasing from 7%-8% to 12%-14%.

If anything, the new system with non-linear post rewards does succeed in preventing abuse but it conveniently made it so that more rewards go to the big guys and the ones who start out are without chance unless they get picked up by the curation groups.