hehe... awesome :D a little damage strengthens the character... I think broken things often make the best googlies :P

now to clear up some misconceptions about rewards going back into the pool and your own vote size... there's actually three things going on, sorry if this turns into a wall of text:

1 - curation rewards returning to the reward-pool
this concerns upvotes immediatly after posting. Before HF20 there was a 30min window in which everyone who voted gave parts of their CURATION rewards to the author, so instead of earning curation for themselves, a curation share of all votes in the first half hour went to the author... that gave an unfair advantage to the author - so now, post HF20 the time window was shortened to 15minutes and these curation rewards don't go to the author, but back to the pool

2 - the "vote-dust limit"
before HF20 if you had a super small upvote (a lot less than 0.01) you just couldn't vote at all... that has been changed to improve the user experience of plankton... BUT

3 - the "reward-dust limit"
this has not changed at all with the recent fork, its been this way before and it's still the same after HF20... if any piece of content doesn't earn at least $0.020 before payout... then it won't pay out at all, this doesn't depend on individual vote size but total rewards on a comment or post... since sites like steemit only show 2 decimal places it gets even more confusing... something like 0.015 gets shown as 0.02 but does NOT qualify to get paid out