I think no particular talent is needed for "covering the board"
Sure but if it works, it is easily copied. If only the first to do it makes money then competition will drive these votes to 1 second (really 3 seconds) where they make nothing.
You perhaps found a profitable strategy which is great. That doesn't make it sustainable or scaleable to more participants.
Also, there is supposed to be a natural rate of return for even stupid voting (so not voting at all is slightly punished as non-participation). That is somewhat inflated now due to early-adopter distribution dynamics (that is, the reward pool is a fixed amount of STEEM per day but STEEM/SP inflation makes that worth less each day). Thus the rate of return on any fixed strategy will drop (I'm told by currently about 300% per year but I haven't checked that myself) until the floor on rewards is reached (year 2? again not sure on the numbers)
In theory yes. But some people think they know best (pride) or are bored to check what others are doing. I mean we should already be seeing analyses of users who get top curation returns (in something like a % relative to their SP) but we don't.
Indeed. The major issue of such a strategy would be vote overlaps due to too few decent + undervalued posts. But there is also the possibility of a posting boom, where we have a sharp increase in userbase and posts - and this coupled with a 5 vote limit (even as 500x 1%) would be unable to cover the board. Even multiples whales would be unable to cover it.
As for the SP rate, I've seen similar numbers with what you mention. We need some kind of visualization tool so that we can simply check past, running and future inflation rates, make calculations on SP inflation or Steem dilution from date A to date B, etc.
Perhaps a few small bounties would go a long way for getting tools like these...