Yeah value is subjective but I like to manually cruise through content and vote on that which I feel adds value to my life or the ecosystem in general (whether it gets downvoted or not). I don't delegate and I don't follow curation trails. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, maybe I'm not "maximizing my returns" but I think it's legit.
Oh definitely, I do the same on this account but with ocd there's a focus towards newer users and older underrewarded/overlooked ones and diverse other things that would take half an hour to go through all initiatives at this point, lol. It's fine to vote that way and it's also fine to just be like "oh I love this author, here's a vote" without even opening up the post, downvotes occurr so seldom and there's usually not much nitpicking like "oh this post is at $10 but I think $8 should be enough", it's usually reserved for the extreme cases so most voting power is quite safe to earn the base 8.5% APR usually.