Even just redirecting the early-voting penalty back to the rewards pool as was promised for HF20 would probably help a little, but I don't think it's anywhere near enough.

It's a pittance. The ~12% of rewards are also just going back into the general pool, I believe. So it's not all going back to curators.

I guess if we did the math, based on the numbers I've been using, it would be around 12% of the remaining 13%, which would be 1.56% of the original split. So, we might see a bump to 13.56% of the total payout of posts. Authors would still be receiving 86.44% of the rewards. (Crude math, but math nonetheless.)

In other words - it's an insignificant amount. It would have practically no effect on anything.