I somewhat agree with your post here.
I don't necessarily believe voting bots are a negative thing; they do contribute to the overall ecosystem here on Steemit.
As someone with <500 Steem, I've worked towards my balance through writing, and delegating my Steem power to such bots; the amount I've made from general curation is miniscule in comparison. The bots really do help a lot of smaller people build their Steem on the side.
I definitely agree that the trending and hot posts are mostly undeserving of their rewards. There's a plethora of pure shit that ends up on there, mostly dumb drama and overvalued meme posts. That's once again where bots do help smaller people, when so much of the good content gets unnoticed.
It's worth noting that I've attempted to constantly curate tags, upvoting content and flagging those who are leeching via stolen content.
The bots in the form we know them, are doing more bad to the platform than good. Besides the fact that the posts with bought votes are outshining the posts with organic votes, which means that you either pay to play, or you're left behind, all the rewards are coming from the same reward pool. So, if someone's buying, it means that there are fewer rewards for the organic posts.
Yeah, curation and flagging is not an easy job regardless of your SP.
I don't know, I guess I have a little bias towards upvote bots given I've used them in the past to reward posts of others that I felt deserved much more than they were getting.
I think Steemit in its current state is mostly pay to play, rather than a more balanced approach. You either make your way up from nothing, or pay up for the Steem Power.
It's definitely not great, and I do believe a few changes should be made to balance things out for smaller users a bit more.