It is an interesting problem that I must admit to having not paid very much attention to. I post content that I hope people enjoy seeing. And if I get good votes on it then that is very cool. I have never used a bot, and frankly I am not even interested in what I consider to be "false" votes because I want to grow an audience for my work and bots don't really constitute a real audience imho.
I do understand the issue with diluting the rewards pool though and I have often thought that if the steemit community at large would simply abide by the rules of the platform then a lot of these issues would go away. One thing for certain is that with more people joining steemit it seems it has convoluted the platform overall, somewhat. However it is still possible to find good content but you have to look harder.
The reason I joined steemit to begin with back in 2016 was to post original content and to read original content by others. I have thought that it might be a good idea to do some sort of steemit spinoff for original content ONLY... where it is done by the rules in order to promote and foment the posting of only original content.
You made some great points here! I completely second your approach.
Unfortunately, content has never been a priority here. Just consider steemit's design and the trending page for instance. All eyes are on payouts.
But money follows passion, and not the other way around :-)