I remember the debate, that SBI/HBI was in essence vote buying and there were a few people with shitloads of stake that were being a bit of a dick about it but I think they lost the wind in their sails and have largely left people alone.
I think it also helps that the SBI account, to my knowledge, hasn't posted the daily SBI reports that people then upvoted and got bigger upvotes on their end but I haven't checked the account in a while, might do that to check.
At my meager 70 shares, I guess I don't have a lot to lose but 600 is a pretty hefty number so I get the hesitancy.
Oh I sold my SBI shares as a few people did at the time back to the owner or someone in the sbi discord who was looking to buy them so I have 0 shares.
I've generally stayed away from it since and as you said in your post I just commented on with curation efficiency, I'd rather give a comment on what I read but I follow a couple of curation trails that upvote a lot of new accounts with manual voting so try to help people get above the threshold in any case.
If the HBI model is generally accepted on HIVE then I might look at it again but I had been advised by a few large stakeholders not to use them for various reasons back in August/September last year