A very insightful perspective. I haven't been on stem for very long and thought bots were normally accepted do in part of the free money. Yet after one full month I simply earned pennies on the dollar and never read good content here. I may take a similar step as you did and try not turning myself into a bot, lol.
I automate my voting for certain steemians I like since I joined and promising new steemians I am trying to encourage to continue and grow their skill sets. I leave some of my SP power for delegating to creativebot part of the PAL network, so I am not against bots. With my curating I try and comment of the blogs I autovoted and I look for minnows that are interesting or trying really hard to make a presence here on steemit. That's on top of the 4-8 hours a day I spend working on my art.