It needs to evolve. We need to understand that the era of the blog's dominance is kind of over already. There is still room for technical blogging a la Medium, but personal blogging has lost out in the social media war to other shorter-form websites for good reason. People don't have the time or patience for this kind of content. Look at the engagement numbers here. They're very, very low. Very low return on the effort in terms of how many people are impacted.
From a personal standpoint I agree with you that bots and bidding for votes and selling votes and whatever the heck else is bad for actual social media websites, but in my opinion steemit isn't really a real social media website at all and in the future it will either die or be overrun by corporations or other large investors and our opinions REALLY won't matter then.
The irony is that steemit can actually cater to the best of all worlds if we stopped limiting our vision of what it could become.