The majority of auto votes give a few cents, their vote is only there for curation rewards and nothing else. This is the bulk of the auto votes you see, these votes have zero concern about quality and effort and are purely for curation rewards.
This is the problem, this is what needs to be addressed not so much changing once again the reward pool system. If auto vote trail following required a minimum value then this would solve the entire issue. Start with a minimum of $0.750 value per vote, if a minnow account an alt account or a low HP account wants to follow with a zero value vote to bad they should be voting manually.
This will be the first Hard Fork for Hive, I for one am glad it is not Adjusting the vote/reward pool. It will also be the first HF I have seen since 2017 that did not include changing the reward pool/vote system.
I don't know if code can be written to limit vote trails/auto voting, but if it can it should be looked into.