I don't know where you get your information from. I haven't seen the code used to derive the results, but I can look at what the little people get from their curation and what the big votes get from theirs by using Hivetasks to check people's accounts.

As for the 5-minute penalty: I doubt that makes much of a difference if you have to wait 5 minutes or if you can vote immediately. Auto-voters don't mind waiting. Just set your 'follow' to accounts you know get whale votes and you are good to go. All votes get amplified if there is a big reward on any given post, making the rich get richer while the little people get robbed of the reward pool's shrunken size. The entire system is messed up and needs to be changed.

If all votes, regardless of HP, had a fixed value from a scale of 1 to 10 then the voter could give a larger or smaller vote based on perceived vale of the content, yet the value of the vote is irrelevant to the voter's HP.