I don't enjoy staking the bare minimum and continuously withdrawing. I recently had to do a full power down and withdraw most of it and the drop in curation rewards has been awful - I had about 11k HP prior and while that's a drop in the bucket it was enough that just by voting for cool content I would add about 200hp per month.
Im glad I had my stack as a fallback when I needed it, but I'm going to personally be trying to get back to 11k+ as quickly as I can, since I love being able to do a .25c upvote for folks who aren't regularly hit by the various curation teams. A lot of folks make great content and get overlooked which is a shame.
But to get back to the actual question, I tend to prefer seeing folks grow their HP because I've seen first hand how well that snowballs into further rewards. Delaying the immediate payout gives you a lot more earning power long run.
It is okay to sell when you need to, but I think you have the right mentality of staking it back and giving rewards back to the community using it. So I can see where you are coming from.