Thanks for your reply, @daut44. Yes, I was using the internal market almost exclusively when buying STEEM initially. As for spreading out your buys, I wonder how significant would the difference be because, in a sense, you're kind of already doing what the 7 day conversion does for you automatically... but I guess you get the added benefit of holding a bit of SBD over that time period which means you get some of that 10% return on SBD along with powering up smaller amounts earlier which gives you the added benefit of lower Steem Power to VEST conversion and the increasing Steem Power as a VEST holder.

Oh, also, another benefit of the convert function which I failed to mention in my post is it actually destroys the SBD (as far as I understand). If it's sold on the market, that debt still exists on the whole system. Also, don't forget, converting gives you that $1 price of SBD which you don't get on the internal market. As my example here showed, I got an extra 62.57 STEEM worth of VESTs by using convert. That's quite a difference over using the internal market.