great post and love the discussions; it shows that the community is active and dynamic!
One thing I love about autovotes is that I can simply manage my stake in a better way. In no way could I upvote the almost 100 accounts that I like to support manually. So that alone I think is worth having the automated function. Of course, one should occasionally review upvoted accounts to see if they still post content that one wishes to upvote.
But yes I would love to see changes in the way that upvotes work and that incentivize manual curation!