The one minute reverse auction window will make curation rewards a lottery indeed. Things like network delay alone can waste seconds or more causing the order of votes to be somewhat random. The block processing time is approximately three seconds, which means that there will be about 20 time slots in which to upvote. I wonder if the system uses time information any more precise than that.
Propably the most profitable way to do curation in the future will be to have a bot upvote everything from one's favourite authors immediately or almost immediately and later manually correct those upvotes that went to content that did not prove to be too popular or those one deemed not worthy of an upvote at least the size given (the altruistically motivated case).
Agree with your statements and as for:
I suspect not, unless you script something yourself on a node? If that is the case, 45/50 seconds would be a nice spot to land.
The hope is that it will be more profitable to find posts that will snowball, whether that happens or not remains to be seen.