Manually voting has some benefits to it than autovoting. After almost 2 years voting pretty much daily, with 
You may be aware that autovoting might give you better returns, you just use steemauto or steemvoter to set up your daily votes on your favorite authors at a good post age to get a nice return knowing they usually make a good amount of post rewards. Without getting into how much better ROI it is to delegate to bid bots nowadays than curating in general, let's think about the pros and cons of manually curating vs. autocurating.
Being active on the platform daily and everything pretty much being public and open-source combined with a lot of stats and reports you can check up on, you see a great deal of things going down. One thing that I have noticed and may be guilty myself of doing (although I try hard not to) is abusing your autovotes. Let's face it, a lot of authors that know they have autovotes waiting on them as long as they post pretty much anything will at some point start posting pretty much anything without the care of the quality. They often get so used to them that they take it for granted, stop caring about interaction on their posts or about the social aspect of the platform. It becomes like a job and grind to them. There are rare cases that those who already are too lazy to curate that they have to set an autovoter notice this change in behavior in the authors they are "curating" and remove them from their list. For a manually voter this is not the case as most of what they vote on they have read it or at least taken a glance upon it.
Another thing that autovoters might not be aware of is what the authors do with the rewards. Many on the platform still use the platform socially, i.e. when they grow in SP they make sure to curate broader and help out others that are smaller than them or newer to the platform. Unfortunately there are also many that just don't care, they've either made deals with the autovoters to return part of their rewards back to them off-chain or just use them to grow their stake in other currencies they are more interested in or believe will be of more profit in the short-term.
Before we get too deep into that, there is nothing wrong with powering down. It's your stake, you've earned it - but at the end of the day there are a lot more authors that are earning stake on the platform in a much more complicated way than you might be. To someone like me, I would much more prefer to reward those that believe in the platform and stay powered up and I believe might do good with their stake in the coming future - than those who are just extracting value from the token. This should be something more people think about.
I've had discussions with people telling me that they are just placing their SP and SBD into another token they believe will grow soon to then be able to switch it back into SP in time. Although this may be true in some cases it can just be an excuse to counter my initial motivation to reward them. Its not that I go out of my way to check transaction history of accounts before I curate their content, but if I notice some constantly just powering down and never powering up - I don't think its strange that I don't feel like rewarding these users for their content as much as somebody else. The case for "I'll power up once X goes up" is not the best excuse either, if you have noticed the markets - things can change rather quickly and there won't always be a lot of liquidity on exchange to allow you to quickly jump back into SP.
To me at a time like this where SBD is so overvalued, I don't really understand the need to power down your account at all - unless you want to power it up onto another account for different reasons. Most of the time it just tells me that you don't believe in the future of the platform and are just using your current position with autovotes, etc, to trade the value you earn here into another project or (worst case scenario) into stupid deflationary money. :)
I personally can't remember the last time I powered down, even though I am making good rewards with SBD I try and power some of it up every now and then, it baffles me that not more users are taking this unexplainable situation with overvalued SBD to grow their stake in this (in my opinion) undervalued currency. I feel like Steempower will be something that many will strive for in the future to have, it is after all a tool to decide how and how much you influence the future rewards of the blockchain that is constantly going down in amounts. By 2038 there will only be around 750 million Steem in existence and the daily SP being generated will be almost 20x less than today. I believe many, like those that sold during the 10-20 cent era will have big regrets for having sold today. That of course depends on the future of the platform and how well the team will work to make it come true.
Everything in life is a risk, I realize that I may be one of those taking a big one by keeping my SP powered up constantly but to this day I have yet to see a blockchain with more potential and a chance at real world adoption come to life than the one I've placed my biggest bet on currently.
I realize I may have drifted off the manual vs automatic curation discussion. This kinda tends to happen when I free write posts, but I do believe that these two discussions go hand in hand and I am hoping that in the near future people will be more careful about who they reward with their influence. After 7 days when the rewards are paid out there is no way to take them back and reconsider, that is one of the big pros of the platform and we have to try our best to not make it a big con.
Maybe the rest of the curation thoughts will take place in another post.
Thanks for reading, as always feel free to discuss this post in the comment section and ask anything that's on your mind. I may not always have the time to reply or read everyone's comment but I really try my best to.
