Well not everyone has the time to manually curate and in truth manual curation pays more than following curation trails. I follow several trails; curie, ocd, curangel, sndbox, steemmonsters, etc but i make more steem when i curate manually. It may not be satisfactory but if the projects have good curators then making the project a proxy distributor of rewards from your account is not such a bad thing. It is still better than bidbots, circle jerking too.

Yeah the analogy hit me when i read your post. I was actually thinking of my own country when i wrote that.