I've never tried being a part of a curation trail of any size, so have no clue as to how that works or why trail followers (I don't know the name either) can't vote first. I've noticed, though, with the curie vote in particular, that there are users who do vote ahead of the bigger voters, but most vote after. So I'm not sure how that works, or why a few might be ahead. And in general, those curation trails are coming in a few hours, if not a day or so after the fact, because it's being manually curated to start with then going whatever approval process they go through.

Something else I understand I'm supposed to go to Discord to find out about. :)