Hi Carl,
Thanks for your post. The simple answer to your question is No. The relationship we have with AppEsteem is that their ratings are considered as "recommendations" for us but are not used to e.g. blacklist concrete software packages. I.e. it's a data source (like many other data sources) that our team uses to help feed our databases, but the decision whether a given package is a "deceptor" or not is done solely by Avast and no one else (and we're then fully responsible for those decisions).
To that end, I cannot really say whether we'd consider your piece of code malicious or not, but I can tell you the following:
1) If we haven't considered it malicious so far, we are not likely to change that opinion anytime soon, and
2) You paying any money to AppEsteem will certainly make no difference to our decisions either way.
Many thanks
Vlk
