I’m not sure. It’s not really obvious to me that it’s worth much to try to game-theory your way to maximizing curation rewards, I suspect for most people it will make the most sense to just vote for what you like

I agree with you. Curator fees are affected by several factors and time is only one of them. I've noticed that when I vote on posts with 100% power, I usually get 3-5 SP of curation rewards. But there are occasional exceptions where I get 16-20 SP of curation rewards from one vote. Because of such a significant difference, I became interested in finding out what the reason is. In all of the times I've received large curation rewards, I've voted on posts that have been upvoted by relatively few people (20-40), but SC01 has voted on that post some time after me. I usually voted within a few hours of creating a post.