From a marketing point of view indeed the Bidbots make sense, and they used to make a lot of sense when there were only 4 or 5 of them.
Also when they happen to be slightly profitable, they allow to offer someone else a vote much stronger than what most of us can afford and that is a great feature too.
I think the current drama about/against bidBOTs comes from the fact that since the release of the open code for one, everyone and their cat own a bidbot, and due to the increase of demand for delegations the price in the delegation lease market has increased and this has a twofold negative effect.
On one hand since there is a myriad of bots most bods have reduced their ROI making them less interesting for the end user.
On the other hand delegation leasing for organic curation has become prohibitive which is sad.
To cite and example I write in English and Spanish, to me it makes sense to heavily use a biBOT when i post in English to increase the chances of being seen and usually there is ROI from it as there are lots of curators out there.
In spanish thou, considering there are only a few curation groups operating it makes almost no sense as it is almost sure you would not break even. (but you get a gazillion of dust votes 0.001)
I do use bidBOTs in Spanish sometimes when doing my witness updates or when I really want/need to have my content seen, but i do it in all knowledge i am sacrificing ROI for visibility.
bidBOTs and BOTs in general are not bad for the platform, irresponsible users are bad for the platform and with the proliferation of both blacklisting and whitelisting it should be under control.
I think the secret of it all resides into finding a balance between marketing and ROI for the content creators.
The current demand for leases to fuel bidbots driving the price of leases up will be what will flip the balance as eventually the ones fueled only by leases will stop being profitable for bot owners and only the ones running with their own SP will remain.
Indeed, it has become more narrow as we have seen many smart solutions implemented to combat spam/scam etc. It is more profitable for a shitposter to hire quality original writing from a bachelor english writer from a foreign country. They realize there is more money to be made if the post is really good when they trend it. I like it.