Nearly all my voting is automated and I absolutely love steemauto as a way to do it since it allows to save up a huge amount of time. I nearly exclusively upvote people form the health / vegan / running / fitness communities on steemit who do good things for the platform (voting distribution). I honestly don't care so much about actual content as long as it is halfway decent.
I see awareness around voting as a big issue on Steemit, smaller accounts tend to think their upvote does not matter while bigger accounts often vote based on what they get in return or sell their upvotes.
I don't really like the direction Steem is going with the SMT's and believe the communities feature would be far more deneficial for the platform right now.
A lot of us have people we trust to put out good content, so automation may play a part. It is a lot of work to curate, but I enjoy reading posts. I've delegated to others to use my voting power more effectively. They can spread the votes wider. I don't mind losing curation rewards.
I really hope communities can give things a boost.