Need Steem to reverse moon! <$1 Steem plz & thx.

I think the minnow boosters are good if you're just looking to earn SBD, not sure it's the best move for building up an account. Probably best to manually curate, as you said, so you can collect the easy SP - don't think you need crazy votes to get a good amount of SP, a bunch of 2-5% votes could probably collect you a lot if you're early.

I don't like seeing my voting power get too low either, even though I'm only packing a whopping $0.03 per 100% vote. I think voting power regenerates at ~20% per day, so you could theoretically run it down to 80%-ish everyday. Just gotta do it in a more condensed timeframe so it's back near 100 the same time next day.