Thank you for your detailed response. I hoped to get more feedback on my questions on the chain but this will do for now. Btw, are you using Hive.Vote or something else like your own voting bot?
As someone who has been around witnessing evolution of this chain from its early days I feel it's not easy to optimise curation rewards manually. But a combination of bot + manual voting seems to be working well for few that I spoke to recently regarding this in other some channels.
Yes, I'm using Hive.vote for the few people set up for automatic votes. The majority of my votes, however, are manual.