Its not about the money, its about getting the word out about the project and the Steem Silver Round.

Then the downvotes shouldn't matter. You're still on the trending page. It's fine if you want to think what you're doing is far more important than thousands of other accounts here, if that's how you roll. With so many prominent figures holding up such bling, you'd think reaching the trending page organically should be a breeze, if it was as big of a deal as claimed to be.

maybe if the #newsteem made it easier to get a post featured

That's what upvoting organically is attempting to achieve. If you'd prefer to go back to a system where people were paid to look away instead of being paid to actually look, so you can pay a middleman to place your work on a page that lost the consumer's trust, so be it. You'd have a handful of noobs here congratulating you and saying "nice post" because they think you're actually popular. And after you're done receiving this pile of disingenuous praise, you realize not one of them actually purchased anything. Meanwhile, nobody else saw it because they were sick of viewing ads and shit posts on the trending page.

There's a huge demand for organically popular posts reaching top slots and at the same time there's a demand for advertising space. You know what the end game here is? The best of both worlds instead of two worlds colliding.