I like most of your thoughts in this post.
I also still think a post should be upvoted because the reader (yes, some people really read) likes it and not because the author is on any whitelist, because he made a twitter comment on what he wrote on STEEM or because he upvoted or otherwise pleased any 'important' people.
And true, automated voting even increased after the hardfork, also because of the new short curation window which doesn't allow to really read a post in case one wants to upvote fast enough.
I don't auto vote, and as I also don't like to further reward all the fast non-reading auto voters with my late upvotes, I decided to upvote comments instead of the main articles (at least in case the article's potential reward is already higher than about five dollars). :)