One thing not mentioned here (at least not explicitly and clearly broken out) is that one of the purposes of the auction was actually to reduce curation rewards on "dumb curation" (authors that everyone knows are going to trend every time) and allocate that budget to authors (and also non-dumb curation) instead. As you mentioned in the post, with HF24 curation rewards are typically 25-30%. With the auction going away, fully 50% will go to curation, including "dumb curation" which means roughly 30% lower author rewards, but higher curation rewards even to less optimizing curators. Good? Bad? I don't know, it is hard to say, but definitely different.