I manually upvote and comment but I also have curation trails set up for groups like newbieresteemday too. Funny enough, the two self-votes that showed up on Ashers league came from a curation trail for @helpie where I'm a member as well, so it automatically seems like I'm upvoting my own post. I like doing that because it helps the groups' upvote rate increase, but I hate how it "looks" too. I've got @friendsofgondor on curation because that's a cause I wanted to support; I only have it set for 5% but with a bunch of us doing it, the upvote value is worth something. I'm thinking a bit out load here too, because frankly, it's something I've been struggling with right now. I cancelled a few curation trails this morning but I'm not sure if it's the right thing to do.

With so much I do manually, I simply can't keep up with it all, so I need some set up on a curation trail.

So, I can see I'm not very helpful in answering your question here at all :) I think there's value in it if it's used right. I'm certainly not sitting at home doing nothing while my curation trails pick up the slack...that I know :)