Great question about the slider bar because many people don't understand how EXTREMELY valuable it is. If my 100% upvote is worth 1.00 STU and I switch to 5%, I can vote 20 times at .05 STU using the same voting power. So, yes. You're correct.

I find it unlikely that there are arbitrage opportunities that wouldn't be too risky. With any fluctuation in Steem price, Steem vs SBD value, vote-bot demand/supply, and leasing demand/supply, there are quite a few variables that would have to be factored in risk assessment beforehand. I'm not going to dive into that mathematical rabbit hole to run the economics on it. My guess is that in the best case scenario, there might be a few points of arbitrage profitability and I don't have the dough to make that worth the time.