Simple is best, indeed. I've been saying for a while now that I find the whole reward auction business in curation an unnecessary waste of time. It's yet another thing that distracts users from honest curation. Curation rewards should depend on one thing only and that is the voting power (= SP * VP * Voting Weight) used to upvote a post. The timing of the vote and the order of the votes should not count at all. What people do now is autovote and try and tweak their upvoting time and weight to maximize their curation rewards. The naive intention behind the introduction of that system was that it would encourage content discovery by motivating people to dig up undiscovered quality posts which other voters would be clamoring to upvote, earning the original finder helfy curation rewards. What happens in real life is that people front run bid bots.