was very disappointed in the number of readers that saw those posts.

If you tweeted to very few engaged/interested followers and got no response would you also be disappointed or would you recognize your expectations should change?

and become depressed

Sounds to me your expectations aren't aligned (that's when we get frustrated, when and it can lead to depression: when our expectations aren't met). Maybe this post can help, I don't know.

why denounce it

I didn't, I said "you're doing well" if that matches your expectations for this platform. Your comments implied it was not and you were frustrated, so that's what I said about it. It may be a great thing, but if it's not great at what you are trying to accomplish for yourself, there may be better approaches for you.

As to your articles, I didn't dive in much. Write an "intelligent" article and link me to it in a comment sometime and I'll give you my honest a opinion as you seem to genuinely appreciate that (and I tend to give mine, whether or not it was asked for, hehehe).

I exchange votes with friends because I consistently like their content (that's probably why we're friends). Bots are just extensions of individual's preferences. Nothing magical there. For example, I use steemvoter.com to vote up some accounts automatically because they consistently provide great value to the platform (in my subjective opinion) and I want to use my Steem Power to ensure they get consistently rewarded, even if I miss reading some of their posts. Sometimes I unvote stuff that's not my favorite, and that's part of it too.

The argument is that its our vote and we can do with it as we choose.

That's true, but I don't think that's the argument. The argument is what is helpful and what is harmful within the category of doing whatever you choose. Some self voting can be good (sean argues for that here and I've discussed it here as well), but voting "without any valued content" is not just not ideal, it's really bad. It's spam. It's noise with no signal. To say "Well, that happens among friends and whales" is not okay, IMO. If everyone did that (especially when whales do it) the value of the whole platform is put in jeopardy. This has been debated endlessly for months here and massive flag wars have happened over trending posts that some feel do not deserve the value they receive. Some people have practically been driven off the platform for whale voting without regards for quality content while others (for a time) decided to start "the experiment" to suspend all whale voting for a time (prior to hard fork 19) to prevent what was even considered abuse of the rewards pool. So yes, there's a long history here and voting for content that does not deserve a vote is not a good thing. It would make votes meaningless and new users who come to check out Steemit would think the trending and hot posts are terrible and this site is a joke. The value of STEEM would eventually reflect that assessment as would the Alexa ratings. Good authors wouldn't bother writing here either as it would negatively impact their reputation to write somewhere that others thought only had crap content.

If people really want to have an impact here, they should buy STEEM. That's how votes matter more and how people get influence.

If my vote wasn't worth anything, this conversation wouldn't be as interesting, right? :)