I love to see a discussion about this topic happening here.

A few weeks ago I made proposal how to fix current issues here on Steem - but didn't received that much feedback on it.

Maybe it's worth a try again now:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@steemhq/how-to-make-steem-great-again-the-exponential-author-reward-method

Here is a short summary:

• The higher the author reward for a content post, the lower the reward for another upvote of equal voting power
• The higher the author reward for a content post, the higher the penality for another downvote of equal voting power

Those changes described in this article would lead to a much fairer distribution of author rewards.

Promotion Bots will still have their place in this scenario but it would discurage people from putting large amounts of Steem(dollar) into those services in order to get on trending. And if they do, they better have REALLY GOOD content otherwise even a minnow downvote will have a huge impact on author rewards.

In order to get on trending good content is what matters again and not how much money is put into bots.

Sorry for self-voting this comment, but I still think this proposal would be a gamechanger for Steemit and will lead to huge growth on the platform and of course much more value for Steem on the market.