My first sentence wasn't a question and yes I'm aware this is how it works, I do this myself like anyone else who wants to effectively buy SP with SBD at a discount. Given that Steemit is meant to be a media platform of organically curated news (from it's users) this is why I called it a broken system, because what actually happens is self-curation. To put it simply most popular articles are those that are payed for, not ones that have been curated by the community. All that would be needed is to adjust the platform to ban self-curation to resolve this issue, it's ironic.