Hello, my opinion on bots is mixed. I am on Steemit for less than a month so I have been researching everything including bots. As I have read that bots are good in some posts and that they are bad in others I decided to test them out. I am still in the middle of testing but here is what I have surmised from reading and personal experience.
I believe that they are useful tool to boost you up those few places that you might miss to get to the top of trending in a category. I edit the blog for eight man studio I am part of, where we develop games and make short films. After a few posts that were written from the perspective of actual game developers with materials that will end up in our game I was a bit pissed by the fact that gaming category is overcrowded with generic posts with a few screenshots of two different games and mediocre reviews. On the other hand steemit doesn't have enough game developers for gamedev tag to be populated. I believe that only way to be noticed in gaming category will be to use bots or beyondbits to boost a few posts in order to show our face in the community of gamers on steemit. After all we are making games because gamers exist, and what is the point of showcasing them on Steemit if the most of the gaming tag is full of videos of two most popular games at the moment (of which one started as reskin and parody of the other).
Other thing I have noticed is that there are a lot of users who have lots of SP and almost no creative posts who circle-upvote each other and continue to grow both monetary and in their visibility on the platform. I also see that there is bunch of new users upvoting them in hope they will get piece of the cake in curation. While that is happening, honest bloggers are struggling to get noticed in the sea of meaningless posts. It is only natural they will reach out to bots to get that visibility, but if that continues to be the case, the whole idea of steemit as the platform is getting a step closer to what is wrong with facebook where content that advertised with money gets visibility.
I understand that the way to successful blogging is no different on steem than on any other blogging platform. You create good content -> you engage with others -> you get followers -> you get feedback -> you learn -> your content gets better and the whole circle repeats. But as whole concept of earning directly from your upvotes and curations is completely new. New users are probably inpatient (I know I am) to start earning from their blog and thus justify hours invested in creating the content and curating the content of others. That is the moment I believe people reach out for bots. They want to see the upvotes going their way. I think this poses a threat to the platform. Due to my lack of experience with the platform so far I don't see the way how to handle this at the moment, but if I do I will suggest it and hope it gets noticed.
On the other hand, one of the beautiful things that bots offer is ability to purchase a vote for other users when you believe they should get more than your upvote can give them. I have not done that yet as I still have close to 0 SP and my first goal is to get to enough SP not to have problems with bandwidth.
In conclusion I believe that bots are not the problem but consequence ot the true problem. If we compare extremes, those who decide to pave their way only by creating quality content and engaging with the community have disproportionately harder time than those who decide to spend a lot of money as their way in. I believe this could be mitigated by increasing the importance of reputation, but again, I need more experience with the platform in order to understand the problem in depth and come up with the real solution.