It originally worked the way you describe. The reason for the change is described in a very old post from early in the Steem era (perhaps someone can find it). The idea is that if you vote 20 times per day with a default or 100% vote weight instead of 10 times per day, your votes will automatically end up being about half as strong each, rather than the first 10 votes burning all your vote power and the next 10 doing nothing (this is an oversimplification as the window is actually 5 days, but you can get the idea). It was to accommodate people at different levels of activity without requiring micromanagement of vote power.
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The great curse of blockchain code is that when it was ever used, it needs to be present forever. That however presents opportunity to "turn back time" and actually use it. For this reason I have full confidence that it never worked in described way.
In the process I've learned that manabars used to hold basis points instead of power values like they do today (up to HF20) - strange thing.
The rules of voting were vastly different but that aspect remains the same. Consecutive votes drop in power right of the bat like today, but it is even worse - due to lesser precision of basis points you can actually stop all mana regeneration by voting too frequently.
OK, I'm sure you must be correct and I misremembered something about the change that was made.
In any case, I correctly explained the reason for the current mechanism. It creates an equilibrium of sufficiently reduced votes when people happen to be more active and vote more often than the maximum rate of full power votes, instead of burning their vote power down to nearly nothing (without needing to micromanage vote power to do so).
Thanks, I couldn't remember why it worked this way...
Personally, I've still got no strong opinion one way or the other, both ways seem to have advantages and disadvantages.
Given the way I suspect people mostly vote when they vote manually, I think the original way (full vote each time) with a 5 day interval would no pose any issues for people, so I wonder if this wasn't someone's theoretical concern rather than an actual complaint that led to the current operation.
For people with smaller stakes, who don't use or IIRC don't even see the vote power slider, voting more than 10x per day would result in a lot of 'dead votes'.
I'd suggest making the change to blockchain as proposed but then offering an UI option, ideally as default, where vote power would automatically be scaled to mana percentage, which would replicate the earlier behavior at the UI level. Power users who want to "use all their vote power" and/or manually control vote power for whatever reasons would disable that option.
Seems like the best solution to me.