I haven't thought about it this way, but you are right. By giving users more flexibility to use their votes whenever they feel like or when they find something worth their votes, it does encourage more manual curation instead of delegating the stake away to curation projects or following curation trails.

There are other benefits too, one of which was remarked by someone in the comments section. Downvote trails from people without any stake in HIVE anymore (or minimum), who DV left and right automatically run out of voting mana much quicker. That makes the entire space less toxic in my opinion, even though their DVs didn't have much of an influence, other than psychological for the readers and sometimes for those being DV-ted.