It is important because the submission process is an important filter - someone from HN saw something and thought the rest would like it. When that is circumvented the front page becomes democratically assembled from content that is provided to us, not selected by us.
A good (content) marketer would produce content that he thinks his target audience would like.
There is no difference as to why a submitter does submit: the variable we ar talking here is the ability to estimate what is liked by the HN community.
This ability is not necessarily afflicted by the motivation behind producing and submitting content.
The original PG essays are a content marketing program for Y-combinator, for instance, but nobody in the marketed to crowd resents them. Au contraire, PG is hailed as a her (tm) and there is zero wrong with any of that, IMHO.
PG's articles are just content, they're popular here but they don't get here artificially. I'm talking about companies who are on HN just to ensure their content reaches us.
Trying to please the audience doesn't make the content suitable, they're still applying a broken and biased decision process to judge that.
