We have been discussing this in another thread.

Anyway, I don't think that your argument is really valid 100%. We have tried to get through without paid promotion, you can check @steeveapp blog. It didn't quite work out that well, so we in the end decided to pay some bots. Which is not in conflict with the idea of genuine votes. We have to be realists, this is how Steem is at the moment.

And really, I have nothing against paid promotion, but I am not sure it should work the way it is now. But we will definitely be discussing and aligning genuine votes further.