I may not fully understand steem and the rewards, but i have been reading up on it and I think i have grasped it a bit.
What about moving to the Flattr model? Where everyone has a voting stake depending on their SteemPower. The more you vote the less each vote weighs? Calculated backwards based on per person voting activity the past 24 hours. Or was this the case all along?
If every rolling 24 hours there is X amount of rewards to be distributed depending on total SP / MVests. And I have Y/X't weight in this total X. The more votes I make the more the (my part) Y get chopped up amongst all votes I made that day? Not sure if this all changes anything .....
Somehow I feel that implementing a vote-weight slider is just an alternative way of moving from 40 minimum votes to 5 maximum votes and if the above mentioned 'flattr model' is already how it works, than by moving the voting slider to 12.5% you can still bring your 40 votes as it was before right?
All in all I think the new 'home' feed redirection is a great way forward to dedicate more attention by default to unread and new items!
What you described is pretty close to exactly how it works.