Curation trails can actually be quite profitable if you follow the right people. There are curation groups like curie and c^2, ocd. If you know who those curators are, follow them with a trail, you will get in after the curators upvote, but before the vote bot of the group they curate for.

I've started maintaining 10-20% of my vote power for curation trails
I follow a few trails of curators who I think do a good job. Honestly if you find a good curator you are likely to hit better articles as far as quality than autovoting with many bloggers. It's pretty easy to monitor who makes good votes or not and you can use the scaled voting + keeping the percentage small.