The authors who use bots will, by and large, benefit from this change at the expense of those who don't.

That assumes that bot users won't have their bot upvotes downvoted away by larger SP holders who are annoyed by their over-dependency on them (as there is now zero potential profit loss from downvoting at 100% a few times a day, aside from retaliation downvotes, which don't apply to accounts that don't create content and only curate).

This brings up another potential future issue - bot users being annoyed by dolphin/ orca/ whale downvotes on their content that they invested their own hard-earned money into (I forsee some "rage quits" happening in the future due to this). The risk with using bid bots will certainly be higher than it ever was before hard-fork 21, that much is a certainty.

I'm actually contemplating stopping all content creation on the Steem blockchain (as I'm making pittance on it as it is) and focusing solely on curation, so that I can use up all of my "free" downvotes without risk of retaliation from pissed off, entitled, Steemit abusers.