I autovote since I don't have much time to sift through posts anymore. Though it isn't 100% autovote, any votes I give on snaps are manual because I have the time to go through short form content and vote for ones that I find interesting. I still vote for long from content here and there as well.
I don't think my autovotes are going towards people who abuse my votes though, at least from what I've seen.
Autovotes are kind of a different discussion, as I said they also have their own faults and some use them well who remain active and update them as need be.
The thing here to put it into a comparison is, imagine someone sent you 0.1 hive every day so you'd vote his post for 0.24 hive (half goes back to you as curator). To not be too open about it, he says okay I'll just delegate you 1000 HP instead and you keep the curation rewards but make sure to give me that vote daily. To further muddy the waters he instead offers you 10k denar so you'd vote him and the only time you'd stop voting for him is if hivewatchers goes after him or he's posting something you really don't want your vote on.
This is what these projects are fueled by, some only look at delegations, some only at token holdings, some based on if you burn their token in exchange for a vote. They're not hiding it, just adding a couple steps to make it hard to spot compared to back in the day it was straight up hive with a link to the post in the memo transaction.
Authors then get guaranteed votes (similar to autovotes), the project gets increased curation rewards and other authors now notice they're missing out on author rewards because they're using their votes to autovote or manually curate others for nothing in return (except a healthy curation system) so they're forced to get involved or lose out to the other author and grow much slower than them. It's a race to the bottom where authors get increasingly less rewards since the rewards they get are mainly fueled by themselves, the project is just a proxy giving them the votes while taking the curation rewards and the fee.
These projects don't curate people not giving them something extra, instead they may give higher votes to those giving them extra if some delegating to them for other reasons aren't posting daily, etc. Thus if everyone did this all curation would mainly be based on how much stake you have or random tokens so new user experience would be shit and no one could grow stake for what they're contributing in the form of effort, quality and attention along with a lot of other bad behaviours guaranteed votes bring to authors.
Yes, I understood that part of your post and I am aware of such projects and against them of course because it is just vote bidding in disguise. Just making a point that autovotes don't necessarily need to be guaranteed votes.
People who set up autovotes can also take steps to ensure that their votes don't turn into abused guaranteed votes. Just like how these "curation projects" turn delegations into abuse. Maybe a post for another time?