Fantastic and hugely complex analysis @crokkon, particularly switching the timing to find the optimum voting time; a very impressive inclusion. Thanks also for including me and mentioning my posts!

For an explanation of my curation approach above, for anyone reading who is interested in the technique I applied, all of my voting is manual. In the period you covered I was challenging myself to win @abh12345's curation challenge and I based my approach on hunting for good curation opportunities rather than a specific time-interval based approach (which seems the approach for the other two users).

I simply searched for posts where I had a good idea a whale vote would follow. Posts on utopian, or OCD, also potentially DTube (although I wasn't looking at this at the time) fall into this category.

Once you are out of the 30 minute reverse auction period, the specific timing is no longer important, just the volume of upvotes that arrive before you. So a curation opportunity that can be found at 31 minutes may still be unchanged at 5 hours, as long as no one voted on it in-between. This explains why a lot of my upvotes are much later than under an interval approach.

I could definitely have received more curation rewards if I had voted earlier, but the problem is being certain that the post will receive the whale vote - for that you have to wait, or take a risk and guess. There are certainly some bot trails now that are taking the latter approach, I assume based on poster success history, and I would expect their curation rewards to be very strong.

Anyway, great post, great read!