Maybe I just live in a utopian idealist mindset. - I believe you do, at least for the moment. I stopped using voting bots a week ago I guess only because they were mainly used by people who were not producing quality content. The platform here has an interesting vision about valuable content. And with money, almost everybody can buy upvotes. Minnowbooster has some mechanisms of detecting spam and plagiarism, and they also have a blacklist, as few other bots I saw have started to make and do not allow these people to use the bots.

This is a good thing for Steem, but still who has plenty of money can upvote themselves their content and push it up like a lot. So you can say that who has the money, has a louder voice :D