Have you try auto vote? I always does auto vote, and most of the time when I find profitable author, I'll set my account to autovote them. For a while, my daily curation reward did pump up. However, for a longer period, I'll start seeing less "profit" from upvoting such high payout author. And then, when I check their voting statistics in beeme.icu, it shows bunch of curation bot vote before me. Fear not! Thanks to my friend 
I don't really participate much project.hope in #hive, so I let the community make use of 50% of my votes. And each of the $0.02 I'm giving, I'm receiving $0.03 back.
So as this one. You want me to explain? I got no better explaination for you. Trail manual voting curation community with front runner, is the best way to beat the reward curve. Especially small timer like me, I prefer to vote a post that already have some buffer before me, so my vote won't go out 0.02 and the discount kicked in and make it 0.01. At the same time, I prefer to have some bigger votes behind me, so I can take back some reward loss of to my front runner.
Want me to show more example? I can go on all day, but I won't do that. I will leave you to explore. There's no secret society here. It's project.hope that I'm trailing. If you're interested, please join me and trail vote them, so I can front run you a little, and you can front run the other by following 
So, worry about too much automation and losses my manual vote? So far, project.hope have never abuse their vote. Not that I can recall. Besides, I have limited the voting threshold at 80%. Therefore, I maintain a lots of useable vote for manual curation.