I think you answered your own question - self voting is not beneficial to Steem in the long term (or even medium term I would suggest).

For what it's worth, I think that Project Smackdown is a solution in search of a problem.

Hardly, the problem is very clear - self voting! As we've laid out, it is counter to the purpose of Steem which is distributing Steem by the votes of others. The problem is that since HF 19 the old incentives against which discouraged self voting have been significantly weakened. We are looking for solutions to that if it was not clear to you.