If you have colected the data from the comments table my guess will be that beneficiaries are not included in the authors rewards. This year the stabilizer is getting a big share of the authors rewards, somewhere around 25% las time I checked, and that seems to be the difference in your data above.
Another note is that giving exact $$ value to authors and curators is a chalenge becouse curation is paid in HIVE (HP), while authors 50% HP, 50% HBD. Even if the rewards are instantly put in power down, the final numbers will be different.
On average in 2023 around 24M HIVE was distributed, out of that 10.8M went to curators, and 5.4M to aauthors. Aditionaly around 1.8M HBD was paid to authors, beneficiaries included. From this data, authors rewards are around 3.6M USD.
I love you insightful analysis. That means you must be a good economist 😀
But does it look as if authors get less from your analysis?
Thank you for detailed explanation @dalz!