it's a civic duty to find the loophole to each law.

Lol, I'm Belgian too, and I wondered whether this expression was typical for the Belgian mentality or not :0)

I agree with @crokkon that for a new user it isn't easy to write post, build a network and manually curate all at the same time. I am 'fortunate' enough not to have a daytime job, but most pople do. Not just that, but a family and a real-life social life too. These days, it seems impossible to get noticed without sending most of the time networking. (For a good part, manual curation is one of the base elements of that.)
But as a newcomer, the gap between yourself and the people who have been here for a long time (and who write a big part of the articles that are of high quality). For most of them, building a network starts with their peers.

I'm not a fan of curation trails, by the way. I learned my lesson the hard way. At one point I got a message from someone and before I knew it, I found myself in the middle of a conflict between two people I didn't even know. They were throwing dirt (and stones) to eachother, and apparently the curation trail I was following had voted on one of the hate posts. I wouldn't even have known if one of the involved parties hadn't messaged me, asking if I would be able to moderate between the two hate-posters...

I instantly removed myself from the trail. I think that allowing everyone and every community to set up its own curation trail is dangerous, because history has shown us what following blindly can lead to.

IMO, auto voting is very useful when one lives in a totally different timezone than the majority of people here, like you and me. I do have autovotes set up, but it took me a lot of research to find authors that are consistantly posting articles I wánt to upvote. These decisions weren't taken overnight