Very interesting observations. I hadn't thought of bidbots as a gamification of the platform. It does put an entirely new slant on it, and raises for me, again, the issue of those of us who code versus those of us who don't and also those of us who game (for tokens) and those of us who don't (game at all), and in turn, who uses the platform for what. So there seems to be a conflict which leads me to concur with your final point:
bidbots are limiting the growth of the platform and that, long term, even the bidbot owners would make a bigger profit/ROI with a $100/steem price. That is a price we'll never see, with steem as a content based platform, while these levels of gaming the system continue.