What I meant is that if you self vote your own post directly at 0 minutes and 0 seconds that you won't get any additional curation fee. That's because you basically don't get any curation reward from the upvoters behind you. Plus of course what you explained that the reward is a full author reward.
I now doubt if I'm right about the first part of my theory. If you look at the pay out below, I know this author always upvotes his own post directly with approximately $8 upvote value. That leaves $10 as remaining author fee. So I would expect to see a maximum of $2.50 for the curation reward. But the curation reward is only $0.64. This very low curation reward should then be caused by many other upvotes in the first minutes. That's not impossible, but it does make me wonder if I fully got it or not?
Yes, if most votes are done at the beginning of the post there will barely be any curation rewards for it unless someone votes later and receives those rewards themselves.