I never labeled your post as naive. I quoted a statement and claimed the statement is naive. In math, that is a word with an actual meaning. Or at least it was a decade or two ago. Maybe it has been flagged and had to be substituted since.
Going back to openly disussing your proposition:
The creators of the parameters can use randomness to shift the 'ideal' spot in such a way that potentially diminishes their overall negative impact.
If we talk the current system where (pre-penalty) payouts only depend on the mass of votes before/after you (not the time distance of votes from each other) and allow the referee to pick any random distribution of the cutoff point (currently set as 100% at 5 mins, 0% elsewhere) - that means one distribution that is used for every post until next fork - your job is basically to find a spot to plant your tree on the timeline at fertile area (high density) with as few competition around you as possible. There is no ideal spot you can precompute, it is a real-time calculated challenge (where you both watch how much space can you grab by voting now from the near past, as well as guessing the competitors' tendencies to see how much space you expect to grab in near future).
It is a fast-paced game where humans can barely pick up the data to make a guesstimate while bots can decently compute both EV(vote now) and the probability of getting better spot later (there are enough posts available to be patient and pass if things go bad).
Your trust in Someone-to-Set-Parameters-Right allows you to present expectation that I found inconsistent with the actual architecture of the game. I wish there was a single word I could use to indicate I consider the statement unsupported and therefore disagree with conclusions derived without being pc-bullied (did I infract again?).
Fair enough.
I do not claim to fully understand the architecture of the game. By all means, call out anything that might be inconsistent with the status quo or otherwise infeasible.
@themarkymark did a great job of explaining the current 'rules of the game' in principle here, but I have yet to dig into the code; so my comments and perspectives very well might 'miss the mark' in that regards.