Automatic payout of rewards to other accounts is hardly going to make it any easier to do what people are already doing. A bot can automate these payments, if they fit into some nefarious plans. This change puts this function on-chain and makes it accessible to people without bots.

This business of bot voting you mention is highly specious. Votes are scaled according to SP of the voting account. Multiple accounts even with a sum of SP same as a single account do not have nearly the same power to affect rewards. And furthermore, the procedure you describe can be done already right now, posts, comments, whatever. So why is it happening so little now? Maybe because it doesn't pay off.

I am voting for the HF, FWIW. I think this is going to be a tight election but there's so much misconceptions about how the system works and what even the new ruleset will entail. I don't think partitioning rewards is really worth doing but maybe it will engage more users in conversation seeking to make the witty remark of the day. This is the only questionable element in my view.

The rest of the changes are good, although I am uncertain whether they are still using a reverse auction on the extended single 7 day payout. They should be, because otherwise vote sniping (or downvote sniping).

I, like many other witnesses, want to see the square or better still, linear (no scaling of weight according to SP) rewards distribution curve. As a very niche writer and with infrequent posts, since the 'no whales voting' and 'whales downvoting whales upvotes' "experiment", I think my rewards have gone up maybe 3-10% or so.

It's more fair, and the power curve, log¹⁰ turns whales into rockstars that every groupie wants to present lines on their rack to them for the privilege of getting votes. Right now, (and mostly unchanged in HF17), 50 accounts with a sum of 100,000 SP, ceteris paribus (all else being equal) versus 1 whale with 100,000 SP, the whale's vote still works out to (on average) more than 10x the group.

Hopefully people will start to understand the actual situation. Yes, whales are overly affecting the payouts in the forum. It was designed to do that, and this was a dumb idea. So was inflating the steem to 300 million. I believe the person who was behind both of these ideas has recently, famously jumped ship. I don't think there is more than a few theories in the WP that actually were not thoroughly thrashed in the field.