But as it is I'm always running lower on VP than I want to be for the posts and comments I really want to upvote more.
This suggests that you're not a good candidate for a curation trail. They're mostly for people who want to support a particular goal but either don't want to or don't have the time to curate manually.
So they do it to try to earn money by curating content without spending time reading on the platform?
Some people do, but it's generally not a good way to earn money, certainly not compared to selling your vote or delegating to a bot.
Mostly it's for people who want to support particular projects - for instance, @curie has a very large curation trail from people who want to reward high-quality posting, and @openmic has a curation trail from people who want to reward musicians.