as an investor who wants to earn as much as possible, you might choose to go full auto votes for those increased rewards while spending little time on the platform.

The problem with this is that while you might be getting increased STEEM rewards, that doesn't mean higher rewards if the value of that steem keep decreasing. Not to say that these auto-votes are the sole reason for the price crashing, but certainly we can all agree that increased interactivity and engagement is good for the satisfaction of the userbase, and with this as the ultimate goal we would see the value of our steem increase.