Unfortunately my curation rewards are low as well, so your drop in rewards can't merely be explained by the pay-to-place system.
I have not analyzed the impact to others in part because the changes are very slow (any individual change takes 3 days to propagate through to rewards), so it's difficult or impossible to figure out exactly what changes had what effects on rewards.
I have some major changes planned, but I'm about to become very busy in the rest of my life so it may be a while before I actually get a chance to implement the changes.
To see a lower limit on how poorly you could perform, check the curation rewards of my @philipnbrown account. I always vote that account after all of my clients, so it's guaranteed to have lower curation efficiency than anybody else. To see the upper limit on performance, check my @biophil account. I always vote it first.
Thanks for response. I appreciate the upper (@biophil) and lower(@philipnbrown) voting data; it is very helpful. Clever idea for discovery. I guess the lower returns are the result of the whales voting earlier then.
Weirdly, right now @biophil is not the upper limit. For a short time, @everythink will be the upper limit. This is due to a weird bug somewhere in somebody's system that caused my @biophil account to vote last on every post for a couple days. I've fixed the bug, but it will take a few days for @biophil to be good again.