I believe an option for authors to chose curators's reward percentage would give an advantage to manual curators over bots or will at least rebalance and give equal earning opportunities.
Bots don't like to adapt to different situations but with this feature they will have to because the percentage that goes to curators could be different for every posts.
So bots voting for the same authors for example will miss better opportunities to earn elsewhere and bots voting only posts with high curation % might lose reputation and money ( post downvoted) because many of these posts will be shit content.

it really has become a "front-running eachother with autovotes on posts we know will trend from same authors"

Right and the sad thing is that everyone loses by doing this.