If you don't want to advertise your work, you don't pay for it.
If you want to be noticed in any other way, good luck because there is no quality promotion on Steemit, or anywhere else.
Also, paid content increases your reputation and steem power. It costs you more in present time but increases curation and image for the future.
Advertising is when i sell space to you that I OWN, it was designed that anyone wanting to earn here, also risked the community downvote. There's no risk for anyone profiting from bot votes. It's not the same as advertising at all. We all knew we didn't want ads, that's why there aren't any, and why the promoted tab became a joke.
Someone advertising his skills is not about selling space, nor is when he makes public a certain event.
There is some risk in using bots, in the sense you lose money for promoting something that probably nobody will care about.
I never check the promoted tab, so I agree there is no point in existing. But saying you don't want bots means you need to have some sort of better filter in their place for somehow promoting comments based on other variants than the reward sum.
I'm saying that advertisement, is sold on a private media that belongs to the seller. The trending page does not belong to the whales. And yes, there should be some content suggestion engines,but using bots is not the only way. Collaborate. Create community. Find a niche and share in it, regularly. you can build audience. Votes are not that hard to get, but value is,because the bots and delegations to bots and groups have decreased vote values.