I do understand where you are coming from and I have been part of these discussions often in the past years on Hive in my circles. Who makes it on trending for what will never be settled and I will never hold it against a Hiveholder to realize their idea on the appropriate distribution of Hive's community rewards. That is how stake-weighted reward allocation is supposed to work and I know that we both agree that it can only work if rewards can be changed both up- and downwards. So if it is specifically my portion of the rewards which seem too high for you, it would be exactly this post (Final poll) within the contest cycle to target as decreasing the payout here would have no further impact on our needed operational proceeds.

Having said that, it is a rather recent success that our LMAC posts make it so high in trending (roughly since 10 weeks or so). A long enough time though so that it already prompted me to think how to deal with this. I very much appreciate the increased visibility that we got for our community through the trending page, however, we don't need to sit there on a top spot four times a week, with that I agree.

So here is what I'm planning to: I will begin posting our trail picks from the @lmac account and thus reducing the number of posts from my account from four down to three per week. This will reduce my personal rewards significantly and at the same time lead to an increased influx to our contest prize pool to the benefit of all LMAC participants. In all probability, rewards on posts by the @lmac account will be lower compared to those from my account, so that the amount we receive from Hive's community pool will decrease too. If we continue to have the same level of success with our LMAC posts I may migrate the Final Poll to the @lmac account too, which would bring my personal rewards finally down to zero.

Finally on Rancho, because it is not uninteresting. Ranchos upvotes are blind to the content, that appears quite obvious. However, since this account votes top down on trending, not blind to the endorsement which a post received by other stakeholders beforehand. So one could argue that the vote by Rancho is more an amplification rather than a distortion of previous consent. The latter would be more problematic imo.

So far from me, let me know anytime what you think. In any case, I appreciate our exchange!