Thanks for sharing, we can look forward to a lot of progress. I'll be happy with a longer voting window, improved reputation system, vote expiration and UI improvements.

As for HMTs, a dedicated asset object would be safer and easier to use than relying on smart contracts. You might want to look at the Waves platform for an example of how this can be combined with a smart contract language. In Ethereum, every token is based on a smart contract, which creates a ton of vulnerabilities in DeFi, since you need to read toe code carefully to check what other ERC-20 token contracts are doing exactly.

For the voting window 6 or 12 hours should be short enough. Why would we expect readers to stop focusing on the most recent posts? We don't need financial incentives here. I'd say we don't need to give early votes extra rewards at all.

As for the rating system, if you as a developer like it, it's probably too complicated and interactive for regular users. @steem-ua designed a promising system that didn't require any user action. It was cancelled for personal reasons, not because it was impossible.