Overall, I like this trend. There's still an incentive to compete over curation rewards but the gap is narrowing so those who are not actively front running bots or doing it manually are not completely left in the dust.

I think if profit maximizing curation (even if it's profit maximizing curation, it's still far better than vote selling, circle jerking, and arguably not a bad thing at all) is performing around 70% of voting rewardings, then with the free downvotes hovering aorund you're likely better curating than vote selling.