That's a philosophical argument. I prefer a promotion system that involves STEEM being burned. To me that is a solid use case for STEEM. That said, I thought of bid bot services as a perfectly fine thing.
Frankly, I never cared and don't care about paid votes. People acting as if their reward pool is being "abused" or "raped" is just dumb. Everyone staking is adding value to the blockchain and due to that they get votes as compensation for staking. What they do with those votes is none of anyone else's business.
This is what I mean by Steem having an anti-business atmosphere that will likely kill itself over time. The only thing that draws content producers here is $ signs, the only thing that draws investors here is staking ROI.
People blamed the bid bots for Steem's decline, but it was never the bots. That's why Steem is still doing shitty even after that industry is gone. In fact, Steem only became less popular after HF 22 and alienated many investors and separated the community. Post HF 22 was an ugly witch hunt of downvoters going around like a mob.
No one will pay money for Steem if it is only used to promote stuff on Steem, The only reasons bidbots were around for so long was because it took about a year to convince a majority of witnesses that if something wasn't done about the issue, the platform would die.
It's like saying people will pay money to browse ebay or amazon or to look at online ads. You need to attract good content creators and advertising before that happens isn't how todo it. It could work in the future with an SMT, but this is very doubtful. None of the content creators are going to want that.
If we have a chain split and 1 chain allows bid bots while the other doesn't we will be able to test your theory in practice.
The bid bot chain will fail hard and fast.