Would I do it? Probably not.
However, I have to say that while I dislike the idea of paying someone to dance with you, I think some good has come of it. Some of the dancers working in that field are quite good, and some of the paying clients are fairly good students. The result is that some of it turns out to be unusually high quality dancing in a social setting, due to the particaption of people who might not otherwise be spending their time dancing in a social setting.
I've had a few dances with some of the better clients while their hired partner was dancing with one of their friends, and found that they had the skills and habits to take social ballroom to a much higher level of dancing than is often encountered. You could ask why they need to hire partners then, but I suspect its because they can afford to, and that one of the reasons they were easy to dance with is that they are used to being able to trust a partner to get it right - they've been building dancing habits instead of defensive or coping habits. But then, by moving from the usual locations for "party dancing" out into a social with an unusually high level of dancing, they may have already distinguished themselves as a bit above average.
