I guess your examples of automation suffer from being too indiscriminate? I pull new words from the A.Word.A.Day archives, and a small but sufficient fraction of those are new and interesting. Muflax had suggestions for language-learning that sound reasonable to me.

I can't really give you advice on other stuff, because I also procrastinate on adding things by hand and struggle to make good cards when I do. I suppose one should worry less about adding perfect cards and be prepared to prune ruthlessly instead.