Thanks @yabapmatt! Both for the praise and for this great comment! I'm certainly planning to add more parts to this guide. I'll have to find a contest to enter it into!

I'm not sure on your conclusion that it makes the distribution of rewards worse though. I'll be looking at this more in part 2 or 3 but my thoughts so far are:
* You can obtain curation rewards of 25% of your upvote if you vote on an unknown author who has a post payout at zero (or close to zero and your upvote is more material). There's also a chance for greater rewards if the post does become popular, perhaps through your resteeming.
* If you vote last on a whale post, or towards the end then you only receive around 12.5% of your upvote in curation rewards (because you give half of your 25% to the people in front)
* If you vote in the middle of a whale post then the rule of thumb I am working on is that there needs to be three times as much upvoting after your curation than the amount when you curated for you to reach 25% of your upvote (so that the height of the new total curation square is twice the height of the square when you voted). So if you think the post will reach $100 then voting at $25 post payout will get you back to 25% curation. (So only one in four people make it to 25%? - I need to think about that more)
* If you vote at the front of a whale post before it becomes sizeable then you can make bank. But you are likely to be in the first 30 minutes. In addition if the whale has already upvoted their own post their own vote will be large so they will capture the curation rewards.   

I need to do more research and map out a few individual posts to see the best point / type of post to upvote. I'm sure it will differ by author not just by size. And my guess is that unknown authors who produce single pieces of great content will rank above the whales for curation rewards. We'll see!