There is an essential part of the use of auto-bots that I see no mention of here in your post @blocktrades. And that is how the current EIP places such a "premium" on the timing of our upvotes. There is no way manual curation can compete with coders who can programmatically "maximize" this, to their advantage.

If those inclined to put some serious effort into manually curating were not penalized for not getting their selected posts upvoted within the first 5 minutes of it being published, I wonder then what the "behavior patterns" on our Hive blockchain would morph to become, as a result.

It is inconceivable to me this change would not result in beneficial improvements.