This looks like a pretty good initiative. I agree that it is very difficult to get good content seen because so many people are paying to promote poor content.
However, I view the bidbots as a method of advertising. Like boosting a post on Facebook. As of now, using them is the only way to boost your post to the trending page on Steemit.
I, personally, try to use them when I can but the payouts are not very good because I don't have 100's of dollars to spend like some other people. Still, I find that when I spend 5SBD on a bidbot that I get more visibility on that post.
I believe that if there were enough whales that wanted to remove the bidbots then they would need to take the place of them. If whales started finding other people with good content and then upvoting them. That would help significantly. Then, the tradeoff would be that the people who received the upvotes, also upvoted other good content suggested by the whales.
It needs to be a group. If 50 whales joined together and started selecting certain users and helping them grow. Then within a very short period of time, bidbots would be out of commission simply because we would be using Steemit how it was designed to be used.