I confess I also didn't read all your reply before, only the first part. Since I'm here I'll confirm that I did vote for a few disabled witnesses. I left the votes for quite a while as they were essentially a non-vote plus a reminder to the inactive witness that some people who be happy to have them back (for example, I'd love to see SVK contributing here again). But I did eventually remove them, mostly because I would get bugged by people who wanted me to change my vote from one of the inactive witnesses to them.
Possibly a distinction needs to be made between for voting for a non-active witness (OK in my opinion) and voting for a witness whose server has been down but not marked inactive and therefore missing blocks (this is bad). IMO, there's nothing wrong with voting for a non-active witness: the whole ability to set yourself inactive was to allow you to stop blocks from being missed without requiring you to contact all your voters and get them to unvote you.
On the whole inactive witness or disabled witness I've learn to see this whole thing from a different perspective. I'm attempting to be as pragmatic as possible on the subject, because I know there is probably no effective way from removing politics from the emotional underpinnings but...
Just the other day a new witness showed up on trending, requesting votes of course, as he should and pretty much casting some buckets of blame water on to high stake holders not casting votes, or casting them to inactive accounts.
My current position on the matter is that all new witnesses probably need that time to ferment in slight failure, as to see if they can cut the cheese. Meaning, that they are in it for the right reasons.
We don't want another @zeartul pissing on the fruit punch we all drink from and I'm sure no one will disagree with me there. With that in mind, I find it healthy that a mega whale account would be extremely hesitant to vote on a new witness, simply because the vote is available or the name is catchy.
From where I stand, you, and other whales of tide altering proportions act in the best interest of steem by being "ridiculously"(please note the air quotes) careful.