I think this is a vexed and complex question. I use them as I indicated in the original post, so can’t say I disagree with their use. Philosophically I agree with the comment below, that once you reach a certain point you should avoid using them. At the same time, steemit is not a level playing field. The system is so heavily stacked against newer and/or smaller accounts that I think that practicality trumps philosophy to a very large extent. The actual profit earned by using most vote bots is so small that you are often not really making much profit from them anyway. In effect you are paying for exposure and not much more. Using a service like @buildawhale you can often lose money instead of making it.
To be more specific in my answer though I would say that I support people creating quality content using bots to gain exposure, I don’t support people using bots purely to make money. There’s a lot of grey area in that answer, but that’s pretty much where I sit.