*** I received this product at a discount in exchange for my unbiased review

but i dont blame you for being skeptical.

you can still tell who is sincere and who isn't

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I think the vendor company buys a bunch of shite from itself and pays amazon their fee and its worth it as an advertising cost.

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Bingo. They'll even buy their competitors' products because of the damage a verified negative review can do to a product with fewer ratings.

Every component of the review system on Amazon is corrupt in some way. The vine reviews are probably trustworthy to an extent. Those people actually are top reviewers who put in time to give thorough reviews of all products, and they're selected for the vine program based on that. However, those reviewers are handpicked for specific products. That means they can be profiled based on the type of stuff they've reviewed and how they reviewed it (so, less "this person is interested in cooking gadgets" and more "this person tends to rate kitchen products highly"). I think Amazon chooses the reviewers, so this can backfire pretty badly, too. I read an article last year about an author whose book was slammed by Vine reviewers who were not really the target audience, didn't understand the material, etc.

There's apparently some infighting with Vine reviewers, too. There's competition to rise in the rankings, which means downvoting (tagging as not helpful) reviews from other top reviewers.