Oh boy, you make good points here! Taking emotion out of it, you make perfect sense.
What do you think what would happen if the voting bots could be banned and these investors were returned their delegated STEEM?
In an ideal world, they would start to curate and look for the best content to upvote. We don't live in an ideal world though, so they would probably do one of the other two... 1 would be bad for Steem price and 2 would basically not be a big improvement on how things are now.
Do you think you would start using voting bots if your predictions came to be true and Steem will get harder and harder to come by?
For my own content no, you lose money using the bots even though the payouts are high. (you pay more than you receive).
The @Smartsteem bot seems to one of the few with a + ROI right now.
It mostly felt like gambling to me. I'm not sure what bots are around these days.