Awesome points. I'm not sure if we could end bot use but we could at least deincentivize bot curation. The main problem is having such a large income gap between minnows and whales because the way it is now, even if something could work, it'll only happen if the biggest whales are on board, even if 70-90% of he community disagree with it.

I've heard arguments for keeping self upvoting, none of them are extremely convincing to me.

I think there should be a huge curve on the dollar value ofvoting power, the same as reputation, so you can buy in and get a higher upvote but only to a certain point. It will discourage some people from investing into a ton of steem power but it'll make the whole platform much more sustainable in the long run.