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Well, that depends directly on STEEM price but HF20 (awesome post by the way) should be here soon or later so I think slight optimism is recommended :)

So... when I go to the steemdesk link, I see a much smaller number... but that's presumably because I have reinvest set to 90%, and steemdesk doesn't know that?

Yup, exactly :) steemdesk tracks only SBD (and STEEM I hope) that was sent to you. You can try to refund and see if it changes the APR, just for testing.

No worries. Also, because STEEM:SBD is less good now than it was before, if I withdrew now and immediately re-deposited, I would get less bang for my buck. The one concern I have, though, is that, after increasing the investment, the payout actually declined, not just the percentage (because I see that the total pool exploded)... this is presumably just because of the sinking value of SBD? Not because algorithms changed?

Nope, nothing has changed in the profit payouts code. There are 2 reasons for lower profit:

  • STEEM price dropped - this makes @tipu vote value lower so the income is also lower and this is a 1:1 ratio. If STEEM price drops by 50%, so does the profit.
  • there is a slight variation in payouts and its kinda hard to explain but lets try :) Lets say that @tipu voting starts at 8:00 each day and your profit is paid at 10:00. If only few users will buy votes until 10:00 - then most of the income will be generated after 10:00 and it will be paid in tomorrows payout - not today. So payouts each day may differ a little, depending on when most of the profit was generated. The bottom line is that no profit is lost, it just larger part might be paid today or tomorrow.