The value of trending depends on the quality of content on Steem. As the quality of content on Steem improves people will flock to Steem, and the Steem ecosystem will raise in ranking and awareness online. This in turn improves the value of getting on trending.
Bot services provide an immediate use case for STEEM/SP, this is true. But focusing on Steem being a place for high quality information sharing is a long-term focus, which the bot services can, and arguably have already stifled.
Human curation programs are the ideal way to move forward. This can create jobs for real people, more than just curator jobs too. If quality becomes evidently more important than quantity, people may hire and compensate professional writers, editors, translators, artists and musicians to improve the quality of their content, and they might begin using STEEM directly for those services.
I don't agree that quality content is going to be a silver bullet to bring the masses, I think somewhere along the way Steemians got brainwashed by that, in reality if I put up a website and put up the best content earth, yet did not market it or have affiliate programs, pay influencers to push my website, hire marketing agencies, have good onboarding funnels etc, I can have all the good content I want but it will never be a successful website.
It takes more than just quality content to make a website successful and become a household name, usability is also another factor, this mindless drive to get good quality on the page is unlikely to help the Steem price, if we get Pewdie Pie or Lady Gaga (the real people) on the front page, now that sells!
Also who is to say that content being promoted is not quality, I too am against promotion of rubbish quality, but if it is not rubbish then I don't have a problem with it being promoted with realistic values that are not over the top, it also stimulates activity on Steem, where there is currently not many value propositions.