I don't have much to do with HW, but I have seen them be a bit heavy-handed at times. The conditions put on people to prove themselves can seem over-complex, but if you represent an external project then it should not be too much to ask to get a tweet from the official Twitter account to verify you. If they direct people to their content on Hive then they may get more support.
I'm not sure where things are going with 'AI'. It will only get better at what it does and be harder to detect. People can use their human brains to decide if something is worth voting on. There can be issues with the big curation projects voting up generated content, but they need to have teams who can deal with cases that are brought to their attention (power + responsibility).
My voting is mostly manual and I do not delegate to such projects.
Hive is an imperfect and anarchic system, but we all ought to be doing what we think is good for it. Of course greed is a factor as it is elsewhere.
I agree with you on many points there. I recently removed myself from the curation trails (a total of 4 trails) I had joined, all except for one, which I have also dropped. Like you , I prefer to actually read and upvote content, rather just blindly letting someone else curate for me.
I get that some people do not visit Hive much, but want their stake to be working and earning, but there are many smaller trails that are better curated.
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BEER.