This is a very difficult subject, and I'm happy to see such thoughtful discussion among people who clearly care about the future of this incredible platform (something of a holy grail for someone like me who values economies of kindness, generosity, and paying content creators for their content... mixed with crypto!).
As a newbie, I think I have a slightly different perspective from most of what I'm reading here. I'm going to be really honest with you and I hope you value that. What I see is that you are someone with a long history on here, a lot of power, and connections to many others like you on here. So when you look at what is good for the platform, anything you come up with includes it being good for you.
Consider for a moment the perspective of a little sub-minnow like myself though. We want to see the platform flourish, but what if the changes that help shore it up exclude our having any place within it? Should we be for that purely on principle?
Bots are the advertising we pay for that let’s anyone see our work while we have virtually no followings and low SP. Without them, we newbies have a very hard time getting any notice on here. Getting rid of the bots only solves the problem of bad quality content being high on the trending page. It would lead to more content from people with large followings being shown on trending, which doesn’t necessarily mean the highest quality content available on the platform. It would necessarily leave out newbies, no matter how good their content is.
Even if we forget about the experience of newbies, such a solution could only be temporary, because the flourishing of newbies is what is required to grow the platform and give it stable growth. We also prop up the price of STEEM, because we're the ones who actually need to buy it before we are likely to be able to earn enough to do much on here.
So I think the conversation really needs to shift to what is best for newbies, and then consider that to be what is best for the platform.
As a newbie, I can tell you that I'm not making money off paying bots for upvotes. I pay more than I get back after curation. What I'm doing is not buying money, but buying advertising.
I'm confident that my content is excellent, and when people see it they seem to agree. But I know that I can't get them to see it if I don't show them at least a couple dollars already on it when they look at it in the "new" or category list. They click through to look and find out it is good when they see the money there. I have to be the one to first invest in my article to get those $2 showing early on so that the blip of time my article is being shown to people even in a list, it catches their attention.
So without the bots, then someone needs to come up with some way of truly promoting the quality works of newbies. And that would be good, because even now, this is really unfair. I'm lucky I had $100 sitting in bitcoin that I could trade for some SBD. Even though I've lost about 25% in value since making that trade, it has served me for one reason only, it allows me to pay bots to get my work seen. I would love to see a system where people who can't even afford that $100 initial investment could still succeed on here.
I think a big part of the solution is changing the algorithm for the Trending page.
So long as the platform promotes making more money on a post as its measure of “value,” that is what people will prioritize when choosing articles to read on the platform!