I personally think it would be better to get conscious manual votes, because I assume that would mean people voting for it actually engage with the content, which is why I am here on Steemit. The earnings here really do not in any way justify the time I invest writing stuff here, even my best hit at Steem's highest conversion rate a few months ago doesn't come anywhere close to compensating me when viewed in relation to my normal fee for translations or ghost-writing.

The curation trails however, given the bidbot environment (which I commented on in your other post) at this time, seems like one of the few ways to get good ideas sufficient attention to compete with pay-for-pump trending stuff. In sum total, better with all manual voting, but first the bidbots have to go.

I have noticed that I have received a lot of resteem bot adverts, some of which promise a set number of upvotes. It may be that the resteem bots are recruiting their own curation trails? I don't really know enough about how the platform works to speculate much beyond that.