I had my doubts in how the system worked but thanks to the code you show out becomes a bit clearer... So basically if you want to maximize your earnings while using bots it would be a good idea to do it on the first few minutes of the post and if you want to maximize your curation reward, just upvote after the post is past the 30 minutes mark?
That's right. Though it's not necessarily true about the vote timing because a lot of folks may be willing to sacrifice a bit of Curation rewards to front run the rest of the voters. It's tricky timing to be sure.