Yes, I'm aware that he's a busy man, and I'm not going to pretend to know how much "free time" he has to offer this type of engagement.

What I do know is that I, personally, plan out everything in my life so that I can fulfill my core values, second to second, day to day. I'd never allow myself to get to a point that I don't have enough time to hit on everything that's valuable to me.

Does this mean that it'll never get to a point that I won't respond to each and every (non-obvious-spam) comment within my posts AND that I'll never NOT upvote every (non-obvious-spam) comment? Sure, for me it does, because I learned early on in my ventures with trying to build rep, both within Steemit and in the "outside world", that the process sucks hard and that it only hurts your chances of keeping with the battle when your efforts go unnoticed.

For someone else, who doesn't have a similar perspective to myself or hold the same values dear to his/ her self, it may not be such a big deal to shift all or most of their focus away from the personable aspect(s) to the business, and I'm fine with that.

I'd say that no damage is done, but that isn't really true. As I alluded earlier, no engagement leads to a slow and steady death (of interest and, if a community wide issue, likely, eventually, death to the platform).