Nothing about Steem is super intuitive or easy to understand, to be honest :) I feel like where the lightbulb finally started going off with you was when I started talking about the impact of HF20 on bid bot votes on posting.

We already know that people set up scripts to front run bot votes to get a cut of the curation. Obviously this will not change, and in fact now the authors of those posts themselves will have to compete in that window before the bot vote arrives for curation. It is an absolute guarantee that posts with large bot votes will be sending money back to the pool, money that previously would have gone to the author of the post that received the big bot vote, and to the users who upvoted that posting in advance of the bid bot.

I don't think this will eliminate bid bot use by any means, but it will make it less profitable for authors and it will redistribute a chunk of the money from the use of bid bots back into the pool.

Likewise, the largest accounts that always have a high expected payout on their posting also see early incoming votes - again here, all large accounts with high expected payouts on posts will be sending back a bigger chunk to the pool. The amount that will be sent back to the pool from haejin/ranchorelaxo will be very substantial, and that almost all goes directly in haejin's wallet currently.

It is easy to think, oh the largest accounts already get most of the pool so sending rewards back to the pool benefits the largest accounts. This should actually reduce the % of the pool that the largest accounts and bid bot users control.