I can really unterstand that vote buying is an interesting tool for minnows, since it's quite tough to stand out in the beginnings. There are more and more users joining the platform, and being discovered is sometimes mainly a question of luck.
However... I'm pretty convinced that there must be more solutions to that demand. Vote trading can't be the overall strategy since it's actually totally counterproductive to our quality standard.
There have been many great curation projects in the past that were 100% focussing on quality and newbie support. I'm pretty sure that we will have them in the future, too.