You said many truthful things here.
But there is a common problem: we all got only 24h a day, right? How many you can devote for curation/reading every day?
3? 4? Well, maybe 6 hours - in some extreme cases.
Partial solution to this is following several other respectable curators, and cast my votes as their trail.
But it should be done with big care.
When I do this - I do it only once I absolutely need this.
When my voting power is just about to reach idling status (100.00%)

And I always set my trail vote size to be very small, usually in the 0.5 - 1.3% range
Besides avoiding idling, such trail also allows me to reach wider spectrum of POB participants, to slowly but surely improve token distribution with every vote.
Another thing is - I do my trailing votes on the last, sixth day of post live, just before it's expiration.
I also set limitations on rewards already collected , skipping very LARGE (90+ POB) reward posts, as well as very tiny, close to zero (<0.5 POB). If a certain post during 6 days collected less than 0.5 POB, there must be a reason for that, right?