I think this 7 day payout was a bad change . I liked it until I saw it in practice.

1 Now Votes No Longer Have Immediate Visible Impact.

The whale expirement gave voters an impact. It's now gone. It might come back after the initial 7 days but I think it might not because even if a minnow vote has the same impact now as before there will be some time value portion. In other words, an early vote doesn't seem to move needle as much as a late vote because some of the benefit of that early vote will not show up in the payout until days 2-7, long past when that voter has moved on. Since most votes are on first day most will not see the full impact of their vote.

2 Trending Page Won't Change as Frequently

The whale expirement got us out of the regime of a few authors favored by whales always on the trending page. This was good because it allowed new voices to randomly show up and keep the content changing. The 7 day payout because it's tied to sorting will keep the trending page static. It's possible the "hot" page will be a good fresh content page but I am a little worried.

3 Exacerbates Reward Curve Issue

This will exacerbate the reward curve problem, the number one problem hurting steemit adoption beyond a small cadre of verbose bloggers. 7 day payout allows popular post to get even higher than ever before exacerbating the reward curve's fatal flaw. For a while the whale expirement, alleviated the fatal flaw by keeping rewards in more linear part of the curve. The 7 day will undone some of this

HF19 Priorities (according to me)

1. Fix the curve asap. This is killing us and will be worse under this hardfork
2. Allow People to Follow Topics like reward curve this has been begged for for months. At least since last august when it became a problem. The communities fix is too complicated. It is taking too long to build and might be so complicated it's off putting. Creating simple ways for people to see a feed of topics they like (like Reddit) is sorely needed.

Extra Here's an easy way to fix community issue!

This can be done by creating a bot that resteemed every post with a certain topic. People could subscribe to bots hey wanted. Maybe I'll follow a cooking resteem bot or a crypto resteem bot. It's sorely needed!