RE: Incentives to Vote for the Underdog
Hey, thought I'd chime in here. As I'm writing this, your post has a potential payout of $0.41, and your net_rshares (I pulled this number from steemd.com) are 5813770798916.
This may be surprising to you, but with this many rshares, new voters for your post will receive very low curation rewards. The curation rewards have almost all been allocated already. You can check this yourself by computing the base-10 logarithm of the rshares; in your case, it's 12.7. The curation rewards start dropping off sharply around 12, and by 12.3, voters are already starting to lose out significantly on curation rewards. By 12.7, the potential curation efficiency is getting pretty bad. It's not zero, but you only get about 20% of what you would have gotten with an optimal vote.
This is one factor; the other factor is vote timing. As @sigmajin was pointing out, popular authors get voted very strongly immediately after their posts are published. Early-in-time votes also have their curation rewards curtailed. So if you get past that 12.7 mark of rshares in a post's first 10 minutes, nobody earns significant curation rewards: the early voters lost out because of the timing, later voters lost out because the rshares are so high that further rewards are suppressed.
My point is that the system has already been designed pretty well to do what you're asking for. The reason you think it hasn't is that nobody (to my knowledge) has ever sat down and written a good overview of how curation rewards actually work. I've started such an overview myself a number of times, and stopped because it's quite complicated and I haven't mustered the discipline to do it justice.
Thanks. I really should do the proper research into this to fully understand.