Great post ! Your thoughts are pretty much what I do already; all my curation is manual, all my delegations are carefully thought through and regularly reviewed, and although I don't downvote obviously AI-made content, I don't knowingly upvote it either.
I've never powered down, and stuck all the HBD I've earned in savings. My only regret is that I invested as much fiat as I did rather than taking the patient route and growing my account through author and curation rewards. I really hope the price of Hive goes up eventually just for my own ego, so that I can look at my account and not see the investment as a loss.