Great perspective and advice there! My biggest personal weakness is commenting. I am terrible at it and I don't like it much as I am not a big talker. Sometimes I just don't know what to say and I think.. "saying nothing is better than saying 'nice post' or some other generic nonesense."
And then there are times like right now where I write a short story in the comments.. sigh
Anyway, commenting is definitely something I am working hard to try and improve on as there is a great deal of hidden power there.
As for curation, I do a bit of a mix. I manually curate when I get the time (though it is not often) and then use curation trails and autovoting the rest of the time. Though I don't technically count that as curation but more as 'supporting the people I believe in'. To really effectively curate I think you have to not only do it manually.. but it very much becomes a full time occupation on this platform.