Haha, yes, the blockchain doesn't forget. Thanks for the resteem (assuming you didn't unresteem in the meantime) :)
Good remark on busy, I haven't checked which views they provide under the hood - will do!
For the reasons not to expose these views via steemit.com I can only guess as well. I think simplicity could indeed be an important aspect. Another aspect may be public perception. The quality on the "trending" section is already under heavy discussion, adding additional views on the highest payouts may not shed the best light on the network...
I was just poking around the "most votes' category and while the top ones are in the lower two thousands, the payouts don't correspond accordingly. Which is kind of sad really, but not very surprising. The one post I saw that had something like a $950 rewards payout had potentially all of the that first 17 or so voters you can see when you hover over it being paid vote bots. :)
So, the higher vote getters with lower payouts are much more organic (unfortunately), then the higher paying one, which again, is not that big of a surprise.
I doubt that the ~2k votes on the "most votes" category are all organic. A new 15 SP vote every few seconds, accounts with 0 posts but >100 followers, ... I wouldn't be surprised if the same set of a couple of hundred accounts appear as voters on other posts as well.
bot nets, bid-bots, self-votes, ...
Yeah, I didn't go looking at the voters to determine if they were bots. I just didn't see all well-known upvote bots at the top of the list. It could be he's being followed by all kinds of bots. I know I am.
It's arunava, and he does have over 2800 followers, which if the bulk of the votes he's getting come from followers, he's got one of the more active following I've seen, bots or not. I suppose they could all be set on autovote. :)