Love the post. This post highlights the simple arguments from what I see is an overwhelming majority. I want to echo your sentiments and add my thoughts. I have spoken to dozens of Splinterlands players and most report the same thoughts. I have never strayed from my disdain for Bot Farms and the concept of botting in general. I do concede that I do no have an issue with whales or players who wish to run alt accounts on a bot to try and utilize excess assets.
The biggest issue I see are:
Bot's do not contribute to the economy in the same way as real players. A farm uses bare minimum assets to extract from the economy. Some farms run into the 10s of thousands. The sole objective of bot farms is to take value and move it out of the economy and to do so with great efficiency (much higher than the average player). This has a negative impact on market prices of cards and value on DEC. To put it simply bots are draining value away from the game faster than Human players can insert. Just recently I purchased several veanri heatsmiths for .004 USD. In an organic environment, this simply would not happen because prices will be determined by supply and demand of humans. Humans would only mint rewards cards on a marginal scale compared to bots leaving less cards available and improving demand and value. Bot farms outstrip demand by a significant margin and hence why we continue to see decline in asset value EVEN with deflationary card burning mechanisms.
Bot AI threatens the enjoyability of the game for all new, advanced or low asset players. And secondly bots are now becoming more sofisticated than your average player who doesn't have the time to spend 100s of hours studying best strategies nor the time ability to factor in thousands of battle combinations to win a battle to produce an optimal team (albeit splintertools makes a huge difference to giving you an added edge) and this is what makes for a good leveling of the playing field. This is often neutralised when both players have to anticipate their opponent as opposed to a bot who can calculate best possible winning combination against you. Bots will eventually have advaced capability to be be able to look on the chain at your history and anticipate your best combination to further their ability to outsmart you.
New players are not encouraged to play Splinterlands. I don't care how much people like bots, the simple truth is when the bot farms took over, went all went from making a few cents to $1 a battle to .001 cents to maybe a few cents in the higher leagues. New players simply don't want to touch this game with a 10 foot pole now unlike back in August-November 2021 hype when the game was less infected by farms. Granted the rewards are now better in terms of card drops, but it now takes several battle wins for someone in bronze/silver just to afford a single heatsmith. People often say one shouldn't be focused on returns when we complain about losing investment value to bots while in the same breath supporting the very mechanism that exploits and disadvantages investment value of those very investors that provide value to the economy. This is P2E and if I invest 20k on a game, I'm not expecting to walk away with 5k 5 years later no matter how much I love the game and bot friendly advocates are obviously wanting the same outcome...Rules for thee but not for me?
The DEVs refuse to cencede bots are ruining the game. I heard one say something of the like 'We want to keep it decentralised so we don't want to eliminate bots because it goes against this' but by making that decision it is a centralised decision from the DEVs to not put this very real issue to a vote by the decentralised playing community. So I'm sorry if that sounds like a FUD but The majority of Splinterlands players want bots (farms) gone and want it to be organic player v player game. This is the key to growth and new player influx who will bring in far greater finacial incentive to the economy that all the bots combined. Having said that, I do repect that players using bots has some merit for whales and those who want to use extra accounts for their additional assets and I do not want to see their assets underutilized as players who have significantly contributed to the ecosystem and I'm ok with those doing that who we can assume will continue to invest in the ecosystem. They deserve to have that option on some level and are not the problem of which we speak of. I believe this will be addressed once land becomes functional which should reduce the incentive of whales botting because their will be more value in creating potions and wepons etc. Many bot friendly players mistakingly think this is an attack on them but lets face it if you have more than say 20 or 30 accounts botting, your probably should be considered as a bot farmer. If you have less than that you are not the main issue the OP speaks of. As it is many players own between 2-10 alts in an attempt just to improve their output to try and keep ahead of the curve.
As a player who does contribute significantly to the ecosystem (I have been called a whale but I dont consider myself one, not yet), I ask the question to consider what encouragement do I have to continue to do so when my assets are decreasing in value due to price manipulation of bots (farms) and the enjoyment factor is waning? The notion of removing DEC as an ever inflationary asset would be a good start to addressing the price dumping. But as the OP suggested. If I am going to continue to lose value on my return, what other choice would I have but to go create 300 bots accounts (which I could quite easily go and make 2000 right now) myself and farm back my losses through reward chests. I have already created a trial account and made back my $10 investment in a few short weeks. If I farmed with 200-500 accounts, I recon I put put my feet up and quit my job via farming value out of the game. Don't want and other investors like me to do that? Want me to keep investing 1000s into the economy organically and keeping it here? Or shall I take my cash I have and buy the 500 odd accounts and never invest another cent again and contribute to the problem by putting even more strain on the ecosystem?