To be honest I was expecting more details in this post, but to respond shortly, yes. Automated voting compared to manual is way more profitable and manual curators are not only being disincentivized to read and curate manually but long form content is also being discouraged. People will either "manually" vote on something from a known author that looks long and decent without reading cause they don't want to miss out on the CR when they stumble upon those posts (I'm not completely innocent in this case either but I'm blaming my health reasons for not curating the way I have been before). So the 5min window is incentivizing short form content or content that takes little time to decide on the curation, such as art, a song, a poem, comic strip, etc.

You may understand that as a manual curator I really dislike autovotes, even though I see the merit they have the negatives that follow and affect most of the authors that get used to it and "abuse" it weigh down on everyone on the platform. This is why a lot of posts that trend have very little engagement and in a way it is not letting the hivemind decide what should be trending based on their interests and stuff they actually do read but who the big accounts, trails and front-runners are choosing at certain periods. At the same time the difference in rewards is very big, I recently went auto on an account just to test this and I was making over 4x more curation rewards than I am on my main account. It's backwards and will need some adjustments.

Another issue is the way curation rewards reward early voters and something that's been happening more and more often lately which is kind of backfiring instead of helping content discovery is being there early or being there early and it won't matter if someone else agrees with your curation to add their vote on top of yours cause the rewards you get are decent anyway. What I mean by this is that when certain big accounts see posts that already have $1-10 in votes they won't even care if the author cured cancer here and now, they are going to skip voting it to not risk being the last account to vote on the post which causes a chain reaction of other's doing the same. Often finding posts that have close to no rewards and voting on them to get their piece of the pie when many times there might be a reason that post is at 0 or close to it. Finding posts that are so low and exceptionally good is not only rare because there still are some manual curators of all sizes but as you say it requires work and people prefer to either be semi-auto or lazy. At the same time some accounts are choosing to curate these posts without spending time to actually curate, they just throw 10 votes onto whatever thumbnail looks good and as long as the post is under $1 or less and go on about their day - this is why using your downvotes will be more and more important for reward disagreement but not going to get into that now.

So there's more than one thing now disincentivizing long form content, both the 5min window and authors realizing that big accounts will avoid stacking votes on content that already has decent votes on it like the plague no matter how amazing the content is. This is also something I wrote about pre-HF and why I was a bit uncertain with your post to downvote anything making "over x amount of $" in the beginning of Hive if I remember correctly. I realize the point you had but to me it seemed like disincentivizing curators who don't care about maximizing their rewards and do vote late with downvotes and disagreement on rewards because they feel something is over-rewarded. This has now created a loop where the big accounts vote with tiny votes and spread them as much as possible, often also on posts that may not even deserve a small vote because they know they'll get the most out of it as curators. I've even seen certain accounts wait for an authors 3rd or 4th post to vote because they know many autovotes stop after 1-2 posts and they'll get the most out of it in CR with their identical 10% votes making so many posts hit the same identical rewards and along with no engagement and regard for the content you can see how automated, bottish it all looks even if it's manual. I don't have to name names, we can all go and check out how accounts are curating and when most of their votes are cast and how many other votes exist on the posts they vote.

Anyway, while this helps distribution it's pushing the autovoted posts onto trending because most of the possibly manual ones avoid voting late while the rest just focus on front-running or being the sole voters on certain posts.