Dream scenario is you curate a post, noone else does, you will have 10%
Thanks for the thoughtful analysis.
If I understand your analysis correctly, the biggest manipulation via self-playing with split votes is 50% curation reward instead of 40%, which is same as linear reward. If they want to go that route they can just early and late vote random comments and snag the 50%. Maybe that's not a bad thing? That being the case, police bots could easily search out those and dilute them. Or maybe let whales forfeit voting rights in exchange for 50% auto reward and 50% spread across all author rewards.
Some will still try to game other people's votes, but it seems to me that the incentive to do that goes down (relative to current protocol) because the late voting bots are contributing only 10% to the nonlinear pool instead of 50%.