The question is what you are going to do once you are a member of the rich boyz club. Will you take your investment and take the more profitable route of delegating to your bot overlords? Or will you reinvest in the minnows that were neglected like you were?
One path leads to a really nice looking "reverse funnel" scheme and the other leads to a healthier ecosystem. One of those is probably worth more than the other but more people don't spend enough time thinking to really figure out the long-term logistics in their head.
I plan to run contests of sorts (mostly in food and travel contest posts) ... I've wanted to do that but I can't give away tiered awards of 10, 20, 30, 50+ SBD at a time, if my rewards per post was only yielding less than $5 to $10 per payout. I'd basically run out of my own Steem, Steem Power and SBD.
So to answer what you mentioned, I'm doing BOTH. I've delegated lots of my SP to another account to self grow ... and then i'm doing a mixture of bid bots and powering down, so that I'll have SBD laying around to do the contests I want to do. I'm figuring out a balance amongst them all.
Thanks for your constructive questions and comments :)