I don’t believe it constitutes a form of criticism to exclude the automatic votes. They are simply meant to be removed from the calculation. That is not a judgement in the sense of “bad”. Such posts can, of course, still appear in the trendings, provided they receive enough other votes.

I would even take it a step further and exclude entire communities. Specifically those where votes are cast by Steemcurator 01 and 02, or by HungryGriffin, etc. This concerns, for example, the POD-Community. And I think we can all agree that this content is heavily upvoted, but would not necessarily encourage outsiders to consider it high-quality.