hey @aggroed!! I love how deep you are diving into this stuff. I just read your pre hf19 post, and it was incredibly helpful for me in understanding it all. Everyone does seem to be riding a wave of excitement post fork...I'm by no means a minnow, but I am fairly new to the platform.

the trending sections are unfortunate

I think we should be doing whatever we can to move eyes off of them. although, I have noticed a funny thing with some of my posts, they pretty much rocket up to the first page of trending for certain tags within a four hours, and then they literally sit there and barely get a vote for the rest of week. Not sure what thats about. (I was thinking maybe people don't want to vote on it because they feel like it's made 'enough' already?)

I find myself having to use the slider a lot (and I have one)

I love upvoting comments!!! I do it very often. I appreciate that the platform 'remembers' my typical slider setting on a comment versus on a post...maybe we just need to give minnows a slider? I don't know...

another small thought is that perhaps by consolidating the power into fewer votes people will have to be more careful about what they spend them on?

There is a part of me that thinks this could be a good thing, as there really is so much rampant voting although it's hard to tell what it's driven by...I think you are dead right about the vote piling. It's like a Nash Equilibrium in game theory...as long as enough people are deciding to (autovote) on the same authors, sweetsssj does come to mind, it's free money. There is no financial incentive to not pile on your votes to a well established author, instead there's financial incentive to do it faster. Something needs to be done about that in the long run, or it will only continue to compound with time