Great post... and some good reminders!
And you're exactly right, there are not very many consistently active manual curators out there. And it's a LOT of work... even on a pretty "slack" day at my day job I feel like I have "been around the world" when I interact with 40-50 good posts AND their comments... and then I look at that in the context of how many excellent posts in total are posted every day... and then I consider how those efforts would truly be nothing more than a flyspeck if Steemit had even five million users, not under 200,000....