I don't think there is a right or wrong in self-upvoting, but rather the intention behind it. I personally devote quite a bit of my voting power to giving 5-10% upvotes to countless people every day, rotating steem to alt accounts that literally do 1 thing - and that's upvoting good talent in a particular tag on steemit and promoting it, with the same intention of building steem power to reward even more.
I warned another user a month ago about this same thing, and that is to be careful about making blanket statements. Starting a movement is great. starting a witch hunt and labeling others as "bad" is itself a bad thing, because the ends do not justify the means, and often ends badly. When you draw a line in the sand and say that everyone not on your side is bad, you make enemies fast, because real life is not cut and dry.
I will continue to upvote myself so that I can better distribute my voting power as time goes on. I am a business minded person, and like any business the owner pays themselves out of the business. Pay yourself too much and you kill your business. Pay yourself too little and you will hate yourself later. Upvoting is a way of paying myself.
In my own case I was able to secure a sizeable chunk of delegated steem power, which cost me many, many SBD, which required me to fork over earnings from mining. I have utilized that delegated steem power to grow myself and to reward hundreds and hundreds of Steemians in the past month, which in turn helps me to grow faster, and reward more people. I am now faced with the reality that I can either let go of that delegated steem power, and lose my ability to reward others, or put a large portion of what I've gained back into renewing that delegated steem power. As I said, I'm a business minded person, and I think long term. If losing that delegated steem power means being altruistic and sticking to someone elses vision of what's right, I choose to be the bad guy in their eyes so that in the long term I can do more good, than if I stuck to a principal of self righteousness.
I track the same goal a you @briggsy and the most funny thing is that both of us will succeed. I'm already making 5 to 10 SBD per post. and I don't upvote myself. I just carefully chose people worth to be upvoted by me and this strategy works because they also upvote me back. And the funniest things that their votes are sometimes 100 times bigger that was main for them.
I agree with your thoughts here. I generally up-vote all my posts as I am investing my time and the rewards are not so great. Since I value my time I up-vote my posts. If I start getting higher rewards for my posts then I might consider not upvoting myself.
Regarding comments I am flexible. I generally upvote my comments in two scenarios