I like the concept of the trails a lot. I was just monitoring how they were voting using my account as I was following them on Streemian and I almost exclusively saw them up voting all the various trail posts with 50% of my vote after HF19 and not actually up voting the people that the trail was talking about. I don't see this as particularly helpful to the community, or the trail themselves. It also was blowing through my voting power quickly. I watched it for about three days and then decided to stop following on Streemian.
Yes, my curation rewards have been cut in half, but I don't care about curation rewards as much as I care about a good community. I also don't want to curate based solely on what is going to earn me the best curation reward.
I'm looking forward to having communities here on Steemit. I'm not sure how much they will connect with the trails. My hope has been that active trails will be the basis for some of the communities.
SteemTrail has just started distributing their trail coins again to people managing the individual trails. Each trail curator can do as they want with that distribution. But good, active community builders would use their distribution to reward folks that are active in their trail or to have community events. I'll be doing that with the @foraging-trail, for sure. And with the @gardening-trail, as I get back to that one, too.