I was thinking about suggesting the removal of the voting time as well, but like you said, if you remove that, the bots will have a huge advantage over the human curators. I've had GINAbot tell me that someone voted on my new post before it even told me that I had created one. The goal should be to leave a small period of time to let the humans get some curation, then open it up for regular votes and whatever else.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You've been around for a while and seen a lot of the changes, so you have a unique perspective on how to make it work well.