I think so but, what are they autovoting on? put flags on top of the usual suspects and things change again.

They could autovote established and popular authors who do not use bid bots.

"That could work better than what we have now."

It could but in general, the small accounts grow at a faster rate than the large as the large can't frontrun really. While people scoff at the small amounts, when there are so many small accounts, it adds up over time.

Front running is but a small factor in the growth of small accounts, although it would become more significant with the 50/50 split. I think @ocdb is by far the best on Steem so far to help smaller accounts along. It has turned many Redfish into Minnows and Minnows into Dolphins. Note that @ocdb a centralized curation project in the sense that getting whitelisted is a decision made by a handful of people as well as getting delisted. Musing was another island of centralization that worked tremendously well at spreading stake.

My vision of successful Steem is a collection of communities where community standards are enforced by the members whose social standing depends on being a good community member or apps with a lot of centralized stake that are capable of effectively maximizing quality for the benefit of the company running the app as well as rewarding quality accurately.