The current system is definitely broken, wholeheartedly agree. The flagging functionality is all but unusable (unless you're a heavy power user on Steemit and your flag counts), I am not even sure what it is intended for when it can be abused by heavy-hitters, like the war between @haejin and @berniesanders where there has been some flag brigading between the two in their content war.
An organic trending page makes so much sense, I could see it working by using some time calculation in combination with a list of known bots. The problem with bots is that they seem to be popping up at a high rate, I see new ones every day.
A good solution might be to analyse an authors wallet history. Most bots work on the premise of sending SBD and putting the link to the post as the memo message. If you could build a natural trending section that automatically excluded any post that has been mentioned in a transaction (only by the author) you might be able to do it.
I dont know much about the fagging war your referring to but I can imagine how it went down.
Yeah most of the bots go through Steembottracker so I guess we would have to somehow link the organic trending page to that where ot would pull the data from who has upvoted what with bots.
Its worth thinking about - I wish I had some knowledge of HTML etc etc then I could be a bit more technical about it all