Unfortunately my curation rewards are low as well, so your drop in rewards can't merely be explained by the pay-to-place system.

I have not analyzed the impact to others in part because the changes are very slow (any individual change takes 3 days to propagate through to rewards), so it's difficult or impossible to figure out exactly what changes had what effects on rewards.

I have some major changes planned, but I'm about to become very busy in the rest of my life so it may be a while before I actually get a chance to implement the changes.

To see a lower limit on how poorly you could perform, check the curation rewards of my Hive account@philipnbrown account. I always vote that account after all of my clients, so it's guaranteed to have lower curation efficiency than anybody else. To see the upper limit on performance, check my Hive account@biophil account. I always vote it first.