While there are the large shareholders, many of them are inactive with regards to posting and voting...allowing both the author rewards and curation rewards be available to the smaller users. (You can see this in the active stake statistic.)
With the 'interest' earned by holding SP now being extremely low, to some degree this can be seen as them 'sacrificing' for the good of the community.
When you say run a bot...do you mean a voting bot? Buying some SP (with those million satoshis) will increase what you can earn through curating (i.e. voting) but how much that exactly translates do depends up how much is bought, as well as the voting practices. I get into the curation formula a bit in this recent post.
Imo, there is bigger money to be made by posting, commenting and generally getting integrated into the community itself. There is also earning by running a witness node, but that requires people voting for you as a witness.
To a large degree, it's a question of what are you looking to do. People who are caring and actively helpful do tend to do well here (though it takes a bit to get ramped up into people knowing who you are and what you do.) But one example of somebody putting some money towards SP and having a big impact at the start...check out the user @htooms.
I am looking to be active and use steemit at least an hour a day. No more youtube. My favorite creators are flocking to steemit, thanks @crypt0. And I am asking more to join. I would like to organically curate but, the voting bots seem ubiquitous among the veterans. Thanks again for your thoughtful response and your insights, definitely a new follower of yours.
From what I've seen, human curators actually tend to beat out the bots. Since there are a (soft) limit to the number of votes we can make a day, the bots don't have that huge of an advantage..even though it takes actual time at the computer.
While I only do manual voting myself (and could make more curating if I wanted to,) I don't really have an issue with bots, however, one thing they always lack is the ability to leave a good, meaningful comment that helps build relationships with other users...which is what I tend to prefer.
But definitely happy to help out. Everyone ends up playing around with the various options to find what works best for them. :)