If you're going to settle for tutoring, find a high achieving eco tutor (like a state ranker or something, lol) or at least a past hsc marker. Tutors like your typical classroom teachers are good - good for helping you understand the concepts and such but really, they lack the focus on exam technique, how to study - giving you past essays, notes, past papers etc which is what you want to be getting out of for tutoring (and like you said - eco is mainly rote - don't need a tutor for that, lol).
A tutor who doesn't focus on reading the textbook for you - but helping you write essays, tackle harder questions + marking essays and improving on them is one I'd say is worth.
I went to eco tutoring once. The only parts I found useful was when he gave us information outside the textbook - like uni eco theories, analysing current trends + news + giving us his hsc notes (and from there I learnt how to structure my notes with exam technique as a focus). The rest - which consisted of basically summarising the Dixon textbook, was really meaningless :/
**** however, if you do end up struggling to rote the entire textbook, then having a tutor go through the textbook with you (although, I really do think that the content is not difficult...) can help. The more times you go through the same content, the better you remember it.
My 2 cents