I think the 40 to 5 is too drastic and may have detrimental unintended consequences:
- It will cause people to spend less time looking for and at content. They will, in their mind, upvote 5 times then walk away for the day. That is the exact opposite of what we want.
- People will mostly first vote for posts they think they will get curation rewards on (high value posts) or those authors who seem to get high returns, alienating lesser known and new authors.
- Whales can still abuse the system, by just voting for each other (or themselves via secondary accounts/aliases). This does not stop bot activity, it just makes them create more bot accounts to do the same as they have done before.
I don't see a lot of upside here, but I recognize i don't have all the information. A drop from 40 to 5 is extreme though. How about dropping it from 40 to 20 instead as an interim measure. See how the community responds and the bots adapt. If all goes well, then drop it again to 10 or 5.