Curation rewards are pretty minimalistic unless you're super active and have a lot of influence. I only "curate manually," and even getting 40-50 posts a day... 10KV is "a really big day."
So I just curate because I enjoy reading interesting content anf giving a tip of the hat to its creators.
Yes, it's much more rewarding curating manually and without worry of how much SP you could gain timing the vote correctly.
Thank you for the hat tip, appreciated :)