Thanks for the input, I think I've got a much better idea of how this voting world works and I can completely understand why you sell votes and I think when you are selling votes to people that are consistently putting out good content then it's not much different than just voting for them normally.
I think the issues arise and people get frustrated when they see 'shit-posts' doing well from paid votes because It puts steemit in quite a bad light and takes a lot away from the trending and hot pages.
I think it comes down to how people do things rather than the action itself but steemit is still in it's early stages so things could easily be very different a year from now.