As someone new to Hive I'm still find myself something taking the wrong decisions, at first thought going for auto vote for profit but then end up without much Vpower to vote manually so I'm constantly trimming auto votes and only leaving it for content I read, just today trim some more as I was voting for creators that maybe already have a good amount of votes and my account is small, I plan to go long term with my account and maybe auto voting just for rewards wont do me any good, your post got me thinking about it
Autovotes in and of itself don't guarantee higher profit than manual votes, not sure how much you know about voting but it's pretty flexible in ways where that difference doesn't matter. The only time you "lose out" on rewards is if you leave your account sitting at 100% voting power, anything under that is the same, unless you go way too low and don't have enough stake to reach the minimum 0.001 threshold.
Been thinking about revisiting a post about how voting power and the reward pool works since I'm seeing a lot of new users and followers lately but if you have any questions feel free to shoot.
Something that may make you realize how it works and what I'm referring to is:
If you are at 100% voting power, your 100% upvote burns 2% voting mana taking you down to 98% voting mana. This means that say if you have 100k HP and the price of Hive is where this would get you a $1.00 upvote, your next 100% upvote at 98% voting mana would consume 2% less mana (out of 2% = 1.98%) thus granting you a $0.98 upvote.
So for instance if you sit at 50% voting mana, your "100% upvote" isn't 100% but 50%, it'd only burn 1% mana instead of 2% and if you want to stay at 50% voting mana you'd have to cast twice as many votes that day (20x 100% upvotes instead of 10).
I have to say I know almost nothing as I only now the very basics thats the other reason of my constant confusion
So with that in mind, it's only if you vote on posts past 24h that already had a lot of votes on them or if the posts you upvote get downvoted can you earn less curation than autovoting. Whether it's manual or auto doesn't matter much there as long as you don't forget about your Hive account and let your voting power sit at max.