You're absolutely right. Because there is no other option available. I actually put in the time to create a solution and am not sitting around bitching about the situation.
Moreover, the situation is a more an issue of posts and not comments. I absolutely found it necessary to use an Upvote Service to get seen so that affirmative action may be taken so that Steemit may grow.
As a matter of fact, I will continue to use Upvote Services on my own posts as well. Unless I want to spend good time and effort writing a post and proverbially throw it in the bin.
Yep. That's the problem. The amount of content (including spam content) makes it pretty much impossible to get noticed without using any service.
That's why I've developed @smartsteem (we just launched yesterday) - a votingbot-ecosystem which has a strict upvoting whitelist. Means: user apply and are then reviewed by moderators with our own rating metrics - called SmartScore.
You can find more info here https://steemit.com/steem/@smartsteem/smartsteem and at https://smartsteem.com