I'm not disagreeing with your perspective but this whole exchange could have been avoided by not buying a lot of votes on an unremarkable post with narrow interest, when we have just gone through months of both social and technical effort to try to revive organic curation, and then when the misstep was pointed out, responding by buying more votes.

There may are no doubt some painful adjustments going on in terms of the structure and culture behind voting and vote selling, but that does not mean devs and dev's contributions aren't good.