Yeah, it can be quite the investment unless you know you are able to acquire delegation. And I'm not really sure what the future of bots will be her on Steemit. I really see upvote bots as not really bots.. but promotional tools. And I've seen a lot of other applications being built on Steemit to provide similar opportunities. I know there's one app that just launched which serves as a social media management service for big accounts on Steemit. Sort of like an ad agency of sorts.
We're really in the wild west here on the Steem blockchain and the sky is the limit. All of these developers and programmers are really shaping the community for what it will become.