Let me start to say I agree with what you suggest in showing better how big (or small) the reward pool is; To give instant insight in what someone / post / comment is taking from the reward pool. It also should show to writers and commenters that the reward pool is in essence quite small and posts with 20$+ payouts actually take a large percentage of the reward pool.

Rewards and Power shall be decoupled IMHO.

Auto distribution of rewards to the top active people may sound a good idea to reduce time spend on reading and voting and therefore rewarding, but I disagree with reward distribution based on top x, whatever the dimension of the list is: number of posts, number of comments,... Auto voting (like also done with bots) is something that I'm not against, however until we develop autovoters and bots that can actually read, understand and comprehend the content of the post itself, auto and bot voting does not help to increase the quality of the posts. In addition, bot voting does seem strange to people (at least it does to me) when you get eg 50 votes, no views, and not even 1$ct due to low percentage voting. Curating is good to help blogging community to evolve and increase. Commenting and seeking interaction is even better to help growth of the community incl active users. Quality content is a must IMHO, so anything we do, shall ensure quality is rewarded over quantity. That can be quality in original blog post, comments and in more general terms: quality interactions. How to exactly implement this, I'm not sure, but probably it shall be a combination of technical, process, guides and watchdogs.