One of the ideas of @commentrewarder is to in a way also reward manual voters more indirectly, because manual voters may also often leave a comment. This is something I wanted to post about next, so if authors were using the project more to forfeit part of their author rewards to the comments, then also only upvote the comments that seem genuine, they would in a way reward the curators as well.
I'm all for rewarding manual activity more, a lot of autovotes are just bloat and we the manually active ones are carrying the weight of them more often then not getting the same returns as us, so author rewards is one way to beat them at that at the inflation level.
Ah, had only read halfway until I commented the above, I see you mention it now.