It's not really that they get penalized, it's more their initial lack of Steem Power that both solved one problem but sort of created another. It was a system that was meant to throttle posting and voting from brand new accounts in the hope of preventing account creation abuse, and also to stop newly made bot accounts from running rampant.

Every account is effected by the voting power curvature issue but it seems to affect lower Steem Powered accounts more than Higher Steem Powered accounts.

In any case I'm glad things are working better for you today. I tagged the account so I could keep an eye on it and it seems like you've already been racking up some post and vote rewards so hopefully you'll be all good from here on out.

Yesterday was a bit of a mess in terms of outrage on the platform and I was about ready to go crazy if yet another change meant to do good had killed yet another function of the platform.