Wake up, Hivezen! You are being ripped off as we speak!

I was here when you said that you would do maximizing, too, because allowing only 'them' to do it would be worse

Can you remind me when this happened? Wonder if it was in the same context cause it's close to 5 years now and I've kept things manual on this and all other accounts, even letting communities nominate posts to help them grow which they can obviously vote on first before our curation accounts. It's not difficult to play the maximizing games, use programs like @rewarding and set timers on when to post on who, check up on how those posts went and if someone started front-running you, then switch the votes up to someone else if the ROI is not worth it anymore, etc, but I've kept it manual on principal all these years, even though I know my returns could be 2-3x higher from curation if I just autovoted. Hell, some times my non autovoting has even cost me and Hive some retention, cause I may have missed some authors I value their work on and they've gone on for weeks without being curated and eventually left just cause I want to be stubborn about not autovoting, but yeah... would be nice to have the exact math on everything but I'm not the right person for that and I'm not a developer so can't translate the code to you directly.

How is that stopped dead in it's tracks?

Those who throw tiny votes x100-500 per day can't be stopped, the downvotes to counter them are not worth the author's experience.

So, shouldn't they be voting mostly comments?

That would be the prime ROI for them, yes, but they're not going to risk getting downvotes cause that would defeat the purpose of max ROI, so here again is a good reason why downvotes are necessary and keep abuse down. The issue is that they don't vote bigger on content that really deserves to stand out, but big enough so that others seeing this don't want to reward them due to their history of maximizing and this leads to the authors not getting their fair share and in turn other content with way less quality/effort getting the same vote strength as the other as long as it is acceptable content that won't garner downvotes and the drama and negativity that brings.

Am I the only one that sees the glaringness of what is being complained of here?

This, above all else, imo, is what is holding Hive back.
Instead of valuing authors with your curation, you, and many others apparently, only care about yourself.

I don't think you understood me correctly, I don't do this personally, if you check the votes from ocdb you'll see that pretty much none are ever at 4-5mins (front-running) and at the same time we also don't shy away from voting on deserving posts which already are at $2-20 (look at posts in Haveyoubeenthere community for instance). Not sure how you thought I was talking about myself in this regard, I'm merely pointing out that other bigger accounts do this and it's something that needs to be fine-tuned in the near future to stop punishing longform quality content or manual curation that isn't entirely focused on just voting on what rewards a post already has and if they can get away with voting on something of lower quality without receiving downvotes that would push their ROI they care so much down.

I do admit we're not complete angels, we do have curation trails that follow our votes which do lead to slightly higher ROI even from our manual votes being cast very late and after many other voters and rewards, but that I figure is something that's deserved due to our history of curation and focusing primarily on what is best for Hive and not for our ROI or to make sure our delegators continue delegating to us due to the high returns.

Those links do seem to be really outdated so I doubt the math is correct although I didn't check extensively. I am not 100% sure but I believe the "tax curve cap" is at 16 hive where it's HBD+ 8 HP together. Say if it's HBD + 4 Hive they get a penalty which increases in strength the lower it goes and decreases the closer it gets to 16 HP. (probably easier to do the math on this curve on 100% power up posts.

I don't think the solution is to just start upvoting comments, cause say if we at OCD would do so, this would just mean we'd be shooting ourselves and our ROI in the foot even harder than we already do and even more of that taxed returns would go back to the pool and back to the maximizers. The solution is to remove the tax curve from comments at the very least, make sure it never gets abused (which is easier said than done) or make curation rewards linear again so front-runners don't get anything out of being first and at the same time not have to vote the same strength on everything that has close to 0 rewards. This has been discussed in a post by blocktrades and there's been ongoing talks about it from time to time, someone even had the idea that maybe downvotes would initially only remove the rewards of the early voters. There's a lot that can be done and tested, preferably on a testnet but there's also a lot other stuff still to be done outside of curation but I'm hoping that we'd consider going back to linear and that this time we nip any bid bot in the bud before they can even begin thinking about starting it up again.