Not exactly.

If the curators accept the story, it gets distributed to all the tags you chose, right or wrong.

That's what seems to be happening now: until Distributed, your story won't be in the tag list.

And it still favors those who get autocurated.

It's exactly how topics worked.

Your story would not be in Topics until curated/distibuted--and if not, never got there.

Further, if it did get there, "Latest" is sorted by time of publication, which means if you had to wait hours or days to get the Distributed blessing, you'll be buried far down the page.

I've asked Support. They say they won't answer questions about Distribution. And they just ignore these questions at the announcement post.

It's disgusting that they pretend these questions are unimportant or "state secrets".