Refunding upvotes in their last 12 hours is on our roadmap and will hopefully be implemented soon. I have a crude refund already implemented but that sometimes does not work because of blockchain weirdness. Currently some normal refunds get lost in the chain so our priority is fixing these before we fix the extra refunds from 12h payouts.

Refunding people before the api nodes got up again would be a nightmare because it means these get processed anyways.

We are working on minnowbooster daily and we have a huge backlog of things to do and automatically refunding these problems is one of them. We are btw always looking for new developers who can help us if you are interested.