So then, I am not totally against voting trails, but people following trails should be worried how the leaders use these power given.

Yes, using a curation trail only makes sense if the curator is voting consistently with the way you would vote.

This brings up an important point:

• consistent and meaningful reporting on the curation activity of curators with a wide 'trailing' would be a wise use of community resources

I began trailing @calumam because he had clearly demonstrated a commitment to high-quality curation and a commitment to transparency and also a willingness to call out folks with questionable voting practices (and a commitment to identifying and flagging plagiarism, but that's an altogether separate issue).

However, this just got me thinking, maybe a better use of @calumam's time would be identifying and ranking good curators. He developed a very intricate scoring system for his POB Word of the Week contest. He could surely do something similar for POB curators. If @culamam wanted to shift his efforts toward that end, I would even support a proposal to compensate him modestly for that from the @pob-fund. Of course, he would also be able to earn author rewards for submitting posts that analyze and rank various curators.