I think you are right on this and I'm very close to getting enough steem power where this makes sense for me. I want to support authors who work to grow steemit. I don't even care if their content is "poor quality" because long form "quality" content is not sustainable. People consume and share social media in short form. That's why I think @steepshot is so great for us. The authors that I will autovote are people who vote up the comments on their posts and who just seem to try hard. It's the only way this thing will be sustainable .
I agree that comments and interaction are very important and if the comments are genuine and show they have read the post they are indeed worthy of an upvote. Quality content at this stage is difficult to sustain as you said and I am leaning more towards good enough content for now. If you look at the trending page as an example very little of that content would be looked at if $$$ wasn't involved. Third party application for auto upvotes can be very lucrative so who knows if we will ever see it as part of Steemit.