If you are a manual curator I would love to hear how you are handling your curation. Here are some questions:
Should I base my upvotes solely on the quality of the posts and thereby support people who already know how to produce?
Should I assign some of the upvotes to people to encourage them to become great authors?

Above all else, i have to say, you should do with your stake as you feel. It all depends what you want to do.I am mostly a content creator right now but when i started up i was a Curie curator and i have been posting to #openmic since week 78 ( i think).

All i I can give you is my example. I am one of those creators that started creating for STEEM. Before that i had maybe 2-3 videos. Im a classical violinist and a singer that never had any experience making videos and because i found one generous orca (Vortac) that supported me from day 1 i am still here. He and 2 Curie votes basically bought all the equipment i use right now.
Because of that one person i managed to win 5 openmics, made a huge number of friends, introduced many people to Steem. Got my bf to start posting. Made professional contacts...

All because 1 Orca account thought i was good enough to support consistently. Consistently is the important word here.

What i wanted to say is that you could go and give a random upvote here and there, never voting anyone consistently, never choosing your "talent" you think deserves the attention. And that is your choice.

But because Vortac voted me consistently i am now looking to invest a couple k USD into a professional music video to promote STEEM. A year ago i sat in my theater and played Operas..

Find a person you believe in and put all your chips on their number. :)

Dropping a few $ all across the platform doesnt do much. We dont create any stand out creators and at the end of the day someone getting a few dollars a month unfortunately wont keep them here. Curie was succesful back in the day because it gave you a 140 USD vote which would keep your enthusiasm up for a long time.