Is the manual curation of Curie valuable for the platform and its members?

I have been working with the Hive account@curie team for a few months now, especially as an active curator since July. I have to say that getting familiarized to the guidelines we use really helped me to improve my content. Reading through other people's posts, most of them truly outstanding, also gave me some ideas about the direction I could give to my own page.

I'd like to discuss an idea that is stated on some Hive account@curie posts, such as the Author Showcases and the Comment Contests. It is the "spirit of Curie's mission to promote undiscovered but exceptional content", as well as "its commitment to building community and fostering engagement on the Steem blockchain". Curating of the content is performed manually by the team, which means that a lot of it may be missed (we do hope it isn't and we work hard for it). Additionally, we, the curators, should always feel encouraged to engage with the author. Sometimes it's not just the (not so much lately) juicy votes but the feedback comments that motivate the content producers. On that subject, I present my question.