If it was just regular users "front-running" splinterlands' votes with smaller stakes it wouldn't have this big of an impact on their returns, there must be other big accounts who may have noticed their late voting and are probably taking advantage of it to extract a lot of their curation rewards. It didn't take long to figure that out neither just opening the posts in the screenshot above up and checking the usual big voters beside @steemmonsters:
Thanks for explaining that; I coudln't figure out why bdvoter has such a high APR
It's a bit sad seeing projects abandon their past focus in an effort to maximize returns, their community looks like a joke now: