I upvoted your question :). I agree with you though. Realistically though the majority of answer upvotes are coming from the @music account not other users on the platform. For whatever reason, they seem to vote for answers more than the actual questions themselves.
In addition to that, I think a lot of it is just selfishness. The users aren't here to upvote others, they are here to cut and paste their answer they grabbed off of wikipedia or reddit and try to make a quick buck. Kudos to the musing.io team as they appear to have picked up on some of that behavior and are tending not to upvote that stuff as much anymore.
Finally, there probably are some people who are just trying to manage their VP and keep things at a level they can sustain. When you are lower SP and you don't have the slider it can be hard to manage your VP (mana now) when you have to upvote everything at 100%.
Greatly put together. I agree with everything you said. You made some solid points.
I myself try to upvote as much as I can and think that it is important for the success of Musing for users to bring up the quality in answers or questions with their upvotes. If not the value, then at least by quantity.
My SP is so greatly stretched out already with everything I do on Steem so sometimes I just dont have the VP but, I at least try to upvote a question that I find interesting enough to answer.
But we shouldnt forget that we need to upvote more answers also .A couple hundred users are smarter than a team of 5 curators.