Thanks for the kind words! Your support and promotion is always greatly appreciated. The more of my posts I can push to the front page, the more I'll write.

You're right on all counts, except that assuming linear/proportional rewards actually isn't rigging the game in my simplified model. We'd get the same results using the proper quadratic rewards.

Your suggestion is to add in

1. Whales
2. A model of voters' beliefs regarding other voters' preferences
3. A true-to-Steem model of early-voting incentive.

Adding in any of these things would definitely change the answer, and I suspect that we could very easily argue that your voting strategy is game-theoretically justified and individually optimal. We could model you as a Type-1 player who has probabilistic beliefs about the preferences of whales, and votes for posts specifically in an effort to push them up high enough to get whale attention. Then the Type-0 whale comes along and votes for what he likes. I probably won't do this analysis myself quite yet - I'm itching to get on to analyzing whale behavior.