My take is there is not much demand for the trending real estate, I've seen days go by without much new stuff on trending. If new content wants to appear in that real estate space then it will have to outbid what is there, which is healthy, creates a demand for SP or demand for Steem to purchase votes. I do agree with you that we don't want every post on trending, certainly not in the top slots, if promoters ensure their post is just off the trending page but high enough for them to still get their message across then that is great, perhaps this post was overpromoted. Promoting is good for a kickstart to get visibility and then be pushed up further by curation consensus. Promoting yourself to #1 takes away an opportunity to discover what organic votes your content might get and thus a valuable opportunity to gain user metrics and sentiment is lost by overzealous promotion.

Everything in moderation is fine, I don't agree with-over promoting myself, but I do feel promoting in general is more liberating than a case where users would have to beg and plead whales in multiple private DM's to let their content have a voice.