RE: Is SBI Still Taboo Or Is It A Valuable Tool On Hive?

These are interesting scenarios to consider. The first case is our intended audience. You build some up, you build up your wife, your kids, value accrues and you get rewards whenever you post, but you don't have to post everyday because you keep accruing value even when you don't post.
The second is something that we would consider to be an 'attack vector' that we think about a lot. There are some ameliorating factors.

• our focus on sustainability means that the APR on Hive SBI is only marginally better than just powering up and upvoting yourself. (Double if you sponsor alts, of course, but then you get double if you self-vote from alts too.)
• 'bad apples' like quick returns and it's HARD to get your money back out of Hive SBI if you need to split, it makes it a good choice for somebody making a long-term commitment but a terrible choice for somebody planning to be abusive. (This is the part that the DV crew didn't understand when they likened it to vote-selling. Vote Selling was 100%+ ROI within a week, so you could run the most abusive content and still come out ahead if you got caught. You would have to run abusive content for years to make your returns from Hive SBI).
• we do have a quality policy, and we're not afraid to skiplist accounts when we receive reports of bad behavior. In the future, account review and skip-listing will be managed by our DAO.
• our maximum vote per post is actually kind of small. We target a VP level between 40-60% and it tends to fall a little when HIVE is spiking because inactive accounts start posting again. The fluctuations are mostly invisible to smaller members, but very noticeable to our 'whales'. $5-10 per day isn't enough of a return on capital for even the minimal effort of posting 'junk' to attract many whales that don't embrace our values or buy into our vision.

In the few cases where your second scenario has played out, we had some conversations with the user, skip-listed their account temporarily, and then coordinated with them to transfer units to respected community accounts when they decided to move on.