Your argument sounds a lot like 'really people do not benefit from this, but I do, in part because they do not benefit from it'

That's some community, civic spirit you got going on there. I can see how you are going to win this campaign.

Of course, maybe I am reading this entirely wrong, and maybe the abstract does not represent the overarching concepts of the document, but what do you suppose this means?

An important key to inspiring participation in any community, currency or free market economy is a fair accounting system that consistently reflects each person's contribution. Steem is the first cryptocurrency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward an unbounded number of individuals who make subjective contributions to its community.

I see, if you want to interpret the parts I have emphasised in italics very disingenuously, that it does not specify the party whose subjective contribution (vote) and the contribution being judged thereby, is not the same person.

The actual reason why self voting was not banned from day one, is the very flimsy argument that you can just create alts to do this, or you can buy them, so, why not just let people do it directly, since they will do it anyway.

As an experienced computer trainer, I can assure you, that in every computer system design, defaults are vitally important to facilitating beneficial and productive use of a computer system. @personz submitted a request to the steem condenser github, that the 'upvote post' checkbox should be default unchecked. Steemit, Inc, instantly made the change. This has led to a greatly reduced number of small accounts consuming their votes with their posts, meaning they get more benefit from supporting their peers and those who they are fans of.

The reasons to ban direct self voting on the chain, in the consensus logic, is a user experience reason. The moral and social and psychological factors of it looking bad 'putting tickets on yourself', as we say in australian english, is irrelevant, in the big picture, as you say. But allowing the users to exercise their power more judiciously, while reducing the cognitive load, is a very solid reason to do this.