For the trail I manage, 100%. I don't know what you mean upvoting my own account. When I log onto my trail I go to my tag, I go to new, and I start upvoting and resteeming articles that have good work and no plagiarism. I retain 100% of my vote power and usually start with NEW articles.
I understand your concerns, but for my trail (science-trail) all of my influence is allocated to the users who I upvote, and I don't feel as if I have don't anything other than try to offer support to the little guy. Even the first post I made powered up so that it would generate the most steem power out the gate, to help people down the road.
I didn't even get any payout on the 607 dollar post I created from scratch (nobody elses content), and the payout I would have gotten from the recent 350$ post, which I planned to reinvest to help grow myself as a reward for my community engagement has been diminished 150$ because of this attack. My trail isn't very old mind you, but I feel this is an adequate and fair course of action which has been unjustly harased.
So you are not one of the trails with links back to @trail or @steemtrails . You don't regularly transfer funds to either of them, then you are not doing anything wrong. There are many 'trails' who regularly transfer rewards to @trails, which is believed to be way in excess of actual author rewards that members of the respective trail receive. This is deemed an unfair 'theft' by many of the community.
Well, that isn't 100% accurate either. The owners of this system have had steemtrails in operation for months, they have other community projects to organize and other accounts to moderate. They claim a percentage of the 50/50 payouts which are the choice of the account owners.
I'm glad that you can recognize that there isn't anything inherently villainous to the project . The members of the community that deem this unfair theft by the community have to understand that the excess generated by the reputation of the trail is the same as any other steemit account. No system can operate to the size of steemtrails without compensating the users who allow it to operate, that is why many of the hardworking users part of the project are speaking out agaisnt an unfair attack on their accounts, like me.