Consider, for example, that perhaps your auto-voting setup simply expires if you don't log in and manually check your vote set-up at least every three months. Or six months... or however long we might arbitrarily decide it takes for someone to start skating by with poor content.

I think it's a brilliant idea in my opinion, and once in three months, no one would complain that it's going to be a problem for them. I think this way, people who set up autos can check back and see what's going on with their setup.
However I still think some of these big auto-vote owners might still go ahead to set the votes up again for the same abusers because they might not want to put in adequate time to maybe discover new content creator that needs support.

I realize it wouldn't be propular with the "invest and leave it autopilot" crowd, but to what extent to we really want a venue that is allegedly "social" to be passive?

Unfortunately, a lot of investors wants to "invest and leave it" and only come back when it's profitable to take profit. There are two or three accounts that are almost whale level that hardly check their autos, but I'm sure they'll be back during the full bull run to take profit.