I always took the approach that, I was never abusing the system by using the bots...I just wanted to get seen!

If I had something I thought should get more eye balls, I happily paid for it...Without a second thought of...Hey, this is supposed to cost something!

You are right man...Advertising and promotion SHOULD cost something out of pocket. Think of Google, no one in their right mind thinks Google will pay them back a percentage of what they dropped on Ad Words....But here on Steem, we got spoiled.

We expected ROI just from the upvotes.

Took me a while to figure that out...We shouldn't expect to get all our Steem back and like you said...Heck, we should burn some in the process.

Cost of doing business and the more this starts to make sense to me...I'm perfectly fine with it all.

New Steem is getting better and better the more we start to see how this will play out in the long run...