Voting accomplishes two things - giving/taking meaningless points, and determining where (and if) your posts are ranked on the board.

The problem with Unidan is that he used a botnet to cheat the system. When you're on the new queue or have just commented in a large thread, a single vote or two can be the difference between ending up at the top of the thread (or board) or never being seen at all.

It's not about the points, it's about the fact that the voting system is pretty damned sacred to Reddit. By breaking pretty much one of the only global rules, he cheated people out of a chance to have their own posts/comments seen. We can only speculate as to how long it was going on.

Creating "useful content" is not a valid excuse for usurping community for your own self-aggrandizement. Even HN has a voting ring detector. Why do you think that is?