I think it would be a good idea to note that the next HF will change it so your early self vote does not reduce curation rewards.
The portion that would have gone to you will instead be sent back into the rewards pool, and curators will see a larger percentage.
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/hardfork-20-velocity-development-update
I'd love to see that. I started doing whatever else is doing is upvote themselves since I only post 1-3 times a day and I spend a lot of time on them. I don't want to wait 30 minutes and remember to come later, so I just click the checkbox (which is defaulted to check but I refused to do it for the first 5 months I was here).
The new change to 15 minutes and the leak to reward pool will change things dramatically. Not 100% sure how I feel about it and if it is the best solution, but I do like the cut from 30 minutes to 15 minutes.
There is a lot of talk about increasing the curation %, and I think this will happen eventually. As it is right now the 25% is more like 16.8% on average.
Curation was 50% at one point in time.
I think that if the rewards more accurately reflected 25% instead of 16.8% like you pointed out- it will be perfectly fine.
However if it is increased more than that- I believe it will even further encourage circle jerking onto just a few posts for pure profit.