I'm really happy to hear this post inspired you to think in terms of your long-term rational self interest of promoting and creating value on STEEM instead of just delegating to a bot to extract value.
I think if more people consider things this way, we'll see more thought put into voting on content with quality (and hopefully investor value) while at the same time downvoting content that hurts the overall perceived value of Steemit and, by proxy, STEEM.