The transaction processing stuff is nice to have automated, so you get blocks regularly.
The human element is best used for the actual distribution of the currency.
Unfortunately "mining" as a way of processing transactions is insanely expensive currently because miners waste massive amounts of hashing power that could be merged-mining umpteen chains. Thus a lot of currencies have ended up moving away from using blockchains for now. Maybe once consumer ASICs are available off the shelf, shipped when ordered instead of having to be pre-ordered some of those currencies will be able to set themselves up with enough hashing power to consider going back to blockchain format.
I have written up some info about "CPU mining" research that has been going on, take a look at
http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_miningI have also been tracking some of the currencies that had to move away from using blockchains for now, as well as various other assets, in tables and plots linked to from
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html-MarkM-