I don't at all think it's disingenuous. It's natural and sensible if anything. And I can see from the response to this post that upvote bots aren't black hat on this platform.
But on other platforms they are. If you pay for upvotes on any other social media platform, it's blackhat and you can receive penalties as a result of it. So that's why I was asking whether they were considered blackhat here. I'm still new and didn't know it was acceptable practice here on Steem.
I actually just bought my first upvotes today to test how it works out, and be familiar with the process. I'm planning to compare the effectiveness of giveaways, buying upvotes, and paying for promotion to see which has the highest ROI.