Interesting analysis, thanks!

I agree that following smaller and more dedicated curators is a great idea of simple yet effective automated strategy. In its current basic form, algorithmic curation is a race to the bottom as bots tend to compete around the same authors that stand out statistically, and try to undercut each other by voting earlier and earlier on new posts from the same handful of "bluechip" authors. Right now it's still somewhat profitable as there is still a lot of herding around the same handful of authors. But increasingly, competition between bots results in pyrrhic victories due to the diminishing returns as the bot fight is getting closer and closer to the posting time. The amount of "alpha" available is also shrinking as people have started to realize that jumping late on the same bandwagon as everyone else isn't a good strategy and it's more profitable, constructive, socially useful and intellectually satisfying to find and promote unloved good content. As a result payout distribution is getting flatter and flatter.

As you have identified it, tracking smaller human curators is the next logical step as only human curators can really predict how other human curators will react to a specific piece of content. That's exactly what @smooth is doing, and I expect this to become a new trend. Rather than trying to extrapolate author performance based on historical cues only, I expect that bots will evolve to detect which curators are human and which are bots (based on amount of entropy in the voting pattern), analyse human curators performance, and use them as heuristics for their own voting. I quite expect automated curation to lead us in interesting territory with bots based on natural language analysis and machine learning techniques. For human curators, there are careers to be made. Whales will start following good curators which will improve their returns. And quickly they'll "scout" best curators so that they can benefit exclusively from their insight.

The bottom line is, as OP said, if you feel that you have a knack for finding good content, keep doing it regardless of how effective the returns. By doing so, you are building a track record, and positioning yourself on the soon-to-emerge market of curation-as-a-service.