Hey Matt. On this one I have conflicted feelings. After all, I am a sndbox member thanks to your nomination. It's been my experience over the years that any group activity on the Internet, like forums, tend with time to devolve into a herd mentality or group think with plenty of snark. I'm not a fan. So my expectations in that regard are always tempered.

In all honesty I never really sought mentoring in the group chat, on the other hand, the founders of sndbox were always open and helpful. They seemed to be particularly motivated toward helping people create social projects, I always got the impression that was where they were putting a lot of energy.

For me personally, they gave me the freedom to do things I otherwise could have never done. For example, working for a week on transcribing, editing, & formatting interviews. Rather than doing multiple posts they worked with me so that I could do one single extended post. One of my goals was to drive outside traffic to steemit, and make some musicians aware of the platform. They gave me the chance to experiment.

Naturally recent events forced sndbox to essentially reboot in a new austere environment. In your shoes I would have addressed my concerns in a direct message to them, but doing so in the group chat was certainly your right. There is still great potential in the platform, but it can be a long frustrating slog. I was very close to calling it quits when you nominated me for sndbox, anyway I hope karma will come back on you and reward the tremendous effort you have put into this platform :-)

As for vote buying in general, I completely understand doing it when starting out on steemit. If you are lucky you'll break even, and in the process you are essentially transferring sbd into sp. So far in 2018 I've avoided it, but who knows...