I'm somewhat indifferent to the reverse auction timer being shorter. Maybe a case could be made for it being longer, but there are trade offs here, though nothing seriously major either way.

Convergent linear forces all profitable behavior into the light to be scrutinized by all. That's it's only intended effect, and it's a big one. You can't downvote what you can't detect in a cost effective, efficient manner. Imagine if we're otherwise in an environment where people are voting honestly, but over time an increasing proportion of stake are using a thousands of dynamic clusters of accounts to give themselves 0.04 here, 0.07 there in countless comment spam. Without the curve these would all be 'profitable' self voting that's hard to detect and will siphon rewards out of the pool until very little is being used for honest curation. Why would I curate honestly for 50% of voting rewards when I can just siphon back almost 100% of it in hard to combat micro spam?

Yes this has the unintended effect of hurting real content and comments under a certain threshold. It's basically a tax on low payouts but there's no other way to stop the above described abuse.

Vote selling, self voting, circle jerking etc are all content indifferent behavior that attempt to extract 100% of the voting rewards. Content indifferent behavior completely undermines the POB system where voting in accordance to one's honest appraisal of content is a must. It's up to the rest of us to keep such abusive behavior in line to bring their profits down using our downvotes so they don't out compete curation. Otherwise, if you can get much higher voting rewards selling votes, why honestly curate or delegate to honest curation?

That's basically the idea. It took a long time for it to all go to shit, it might take a while for it to correct itself again, assuming the EIP is broadly sound. I can't promise it'll definitely get us there, but for something 2 weeks in, it's not looking too bad. OCDB, Smartsteem, bernie, myself, switching sides. Haejin on lockdown. Bid bots businesses falling. Initial signs look ok.

Still a shit load of vote selling and circle jerking etc, but the more people switching sides now that curation is more attractive, the stronger our chances. More robust curation initiatives and downvote tools are still being developed. We're still reeling from the price fall. All things considered we have to fight for honest curation being the dominant behavior on this platform and there are some positive signs.