It's a lot better if people join curation trails rather than auto voting a certain author blindly. It all depends on how we market this hard fork. It also sucks forcing users to vote but we can encourage them to follow existing manual voters. After the HF25, there is no more incentive for running a curation trail (unless you want to abuse it for circle-jerking, etc) so I don't know how this will play out.
Anyway, it's nice to move in a direction even if it's not perfect. We know, Hive is improving or at least is trying to improve itself. Who could think a decentralized community can achieve such things.
Actually if you have multiple accounts to curate and comment in the tribes with and then following those with your main account where you have your HP staked then that is a great use of curation trails I think, you can give higher votes with tribe tokens and still not depleting your HP voting power.