There are at least two very good reasons to delay the payouts. One being the possibility of obvious bugs in new code. If, for example, it turned out that rewards were being generated at twice the specified rate, credited to the wrong account, etc. then it would make perfect sense to fix the bug before doing the payout.
The second reason is that the reward fund started accruing well before the web site was open for posting, and certainly before it had many users. If the payouts were made on the normal 24-hour schedule the first few users on the site the first day would have gotten huge rewards. It makes more sense for those initial rewards to be spread out over a few months of usage.
Yeah, makes sense.
Seems like we're a bit in the DAO dilemma - is it code or intention that counts, and if the latter, whose? I for my part expected a curve like the new one for the first payout, and wouldn't have participated at all if I could've forseen the old one. I don't fully understand the changes we see here, why I'm up so much and you and nextgen losses are so unproportionally high. But I wouldn't care when I'd be on the other side of the fence, because I want that wide distribution that has been announced at the beginning of beta to happen. That's what I bought into.
https://coinreport.net/conversation-ned-scott-ceo-steemit/
I agree with @pharesim that this is similar to a DAO dilemma (I would've posted directly under his post, but too many descendants from the parents' post).
However, what is different is not so much the intention-- I would argue that the DAO fiasco was due to a bug in the contract and someone understanding the nature of how that contract was written using his / her expertise as a programmer. But with this situation, what we have was a complete lack of data about **HOW** the algorithm would perform. I find it unjust to reward behavior based on rules that were not known while actions were being performed, even if the new rules achieve the intention of a much more even reward distribution after the data has come in.