I suspect most users will translate the changes into:
More power for whales
More money for whales
Less money for authors
More downvote abuse
I suspect most users are right.
I don't see the whales spending their time searching for the quality content to upvote. At best, the bid bots will be replaced by the curation bots. My prediction is that we'll see the whales running/delegating to the curation bots and those bots upvoting the golden boys 24/7.
Write good content, get rewarded is a lie. It's been since I've joined the platform and it will be in the future. Steemit is a collection of the upvote circles of various sizes and strength + bid bots.
The dApps and their creative use of the reward pool are the way forward. The quality content is neither being produced nor rewarded here. Nobody outside this bubble cares about it. Hell, even those here don't care about it.
What they care about is getting the big upvotes themselves. Just ask them what the quality content is... it's always their content first, their friends second, and at the distant 3rd place is an objectively good content produced by a talented author that's not in.
What I'm trying to say is that all those things that you hate, I like. My opinion is not a popular one but it is honest at least.
From what I've observed as an outsider, the loudest noise about the quality content is being made by those that lost the big upvotes when the bidbots showed up. The whales delegated their sp and the golden boys' posts payouts went down.
I can already see a bunch of self-righteous pricks running around downvoting those smaller than them. Fun times ahead.
In conclusion, the whales will get more than now, the golden boys will be downvoting the small guys that dared to use the bidbots...
PS - The proponents of this change should keep some numbers. Let's see how many whales are doing manual curation today, how many will be doing it 3 months after the hf.... I think we both know that whales won't be spending their time searching for the quality content to upvote. Curation bots here we come!