many a good and often a great thing gets overlooked.
I agree, and I'll quote my parent comment.
"This is a result of decentralization, favoritism, ulterior motives, and just poor content discovery options."
I'm supporting HER.
My original comment brings this up as well, I do the same thing. I use votes to support people, not always specific pieces of content. I like to support authors I believe that are creating good content and /or putting in effort. If I see something that stands out, I vote that as well. An important thing if you use votes to "support people" is reviewing those votes and those people as people tend to change when given automatic votes.
I do regularly just like you. I have my personal options and my community ones. Some are similar. But I'd say only half of, maybe less, haven't actually counted, of my votes are auto. Most of my personal is manual. I don't care if I get down in the 60% range, it's not just about the curation for me. Retaining users is a struggle itself. We wouldn't be much without them.