I think seeing powerful accounts downvoting every post I make would be unpleasant even if it was arguably for a good reason.

You might be right about that. It was quite definitely a sore point the first time around. Communicating it in advance might minimize that frustration, but then again, it might not.

I actually wrote a simulator that would report the actual rewards and simulated rewards under a 2nd price auction algorithm back when the rewards curve was still linear. I never collected data on large numbers of posts, though. Just a few hand-picked examples. You're also right that this technique would not tell us about the way that people will adjust their behavior.

I like the idea of looking at more than just two candidate algorithms at the same time. That's not something I had considered before.