Vote selling and buying only benefits the people involved in that. It's literally taxing on the reward pool for everyone else indirectly by taking up such a huge portion of it to promote often questionable content usually purely for profit.
Did you know you can make your own scot token and give it a try? With a few thousand you can get a webpage and a bid bot. I'm sure the bot owners could easily afford this considering they have millions of Steem.
However, only a few communities still do it. The rest stopped offering this service entirely after watching what it quickly did to their communities, the same happened on Steem just on a larger scale.
I think you should check out the token communities that still offer it. Maybe you will find these places more welcoming and in line with your ways of thinking.
We aren't fighting the free market.
You are free to buy and sell votes, no one is stopping you.
I am free to upvote and downvote whoever I want. It's called stakeholder activism and it's much more powerful than any unnatural restraint on the free market.
If it alienates people who refuse to adapt and accept the new steem consensus, so be it. We will be better off without these people.