Sorry, I don't mean to sound so negative, I just try to convey how the paid votes could actually benefit steemit indirectly, since most of what I see lately is either saying they are really bad because of the examples where they're used on trash posting, or small people are defending it from the perspective of "I need these to survive". Your perspective is quite different than either of those, but I generally take the stance that steemit as a whole could benefit from such a thing especially if it is improved upon because of what is going on outside of steemit and where the big investments might actually come from. In fact I think promotion type utility could go way beyond what we have now, make the voting bots obsolete in the process to solve the problems people have with those and maybe we get the best of both worlds.

I hope I don't offend you with the random things I say though. The part about whale votes was more about how it is basically impossible for them to go through all of the posts to find lots of things to push up and how that alongside the paid vote issue probably makes it seem even worse because a larger number of things in trending are from paid votes rather than curation, it was just an example I thought related to the trending page problem and in no way meant to imply you should have less votes for any of your posts, or that I should have more :)

The way i see it promotion was built right into steemit but the promoted thing doesn't really do the job right because in order for it to work those promoted posts have to be alongside the others instead of being placed into some quarantine zone. I imagine if google ads were in an ads-only page and nowhere else instead of listed near the search results or on different websites, then nobody would ever buy google ads and they wouldn't have had the infinite money to develop so far as creating things like google earth :)

[Chapter 4]

turns out it is easy to end up ranting about such a topic!
ahaha ^_^