I may be an outlier but, as a player, I enjoy battling against competitive bots. On the other hand, I know that massive botting is a huge problem for Splinterlands. And it's not only happening in lower leagues, but also in Champion league too. There are top guilds full of botted accounts. As a player - I don't mind tbh, as someone thinking about Splinterlands future, I'm afraid it may go in the wrong direction. We already could have seen how it can look like long time ago, when infamous th12 botnet was trying to dominate leaderboard/tournaments.
And there is no easy way to detect who is botting and who is playing manually, because you can just use a tool that suggest you what teams to submit, but you enter them manually. So any ideas like separate leagues won't work. The only way to find real human players would be to organize face2face tournament, but of course it's not easy.
Bots have a lot of advantages like they don't get tired, then can play 24/7, they don't get nervous etc etc. Of course they have disadvantages too, some of them are slow to adapt when new cards/abilities/rulesets are released, some of them have bugs so they keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
I don't use bot and I am not going to use any bot in the future. I enjoy competition and that's why I still play Splinterlands. I would rather sell my cards and buy BTC if I realize that I don't enjoy the game anymore.