I've been trying to find the time today to reply properly to this and finally came here to do just that, when I read your comment and found that it perfectly encapsulated what I wanted to get across, hehe.

@anibas - I sense a bit of indignation in your post and please accept my apologies, I didn't mean to come across as so critical (the word justify was not exactly what I meant) but I'm glad now because it has created a forum for us to discuss this more. Thank you for taking the time to respond to my comment so thoroughly.

As @gric says, it's all about the survival of the Steemit platform. @tarazkp wrote about this excellently in this post and I simply chose not to be part of it. I agree that using bots when your content is good quality is better than spam-posting and exploiting the bot system to upvote that... But it's like vegetarianism. I don't eat meat even if I know the meat is "organic" from a grain-fed, free-roaming cow because that does nothing to help the terrible system of suffering we have in place at the moment.

So I'd rather get my votes from real people by interacting in communities and help build these communities even if I could be using the bot/vote-buying system for my benefit because in the long run, if everyone does that, Steemit will die and we'll all lose.