It's all a battle with curation isn't it? This is well said. and thank you for voicing this.

I too played with SteemVoter a bit when I joined, I also was manually voting, and thus my VP ended up super low and I had no idea what was going on.

Since then I have stuck to mostly all manual voting so as to keep myself engaged, and to not reward crappy content. People who know they have autovotes can (and sometimes do) get lazy and post crap. I don't want to automatically vote on their crap just because I like them. I don't automatically give anyone an upvote, even the people I consider myself closest to on the platform have to earn the vote.

Maybe when I get more established and can't keep up with my feed as well that could change, but for now, I don't worry so much about the curation reward, and more just vote the things I like!