Self-voting is not the problem. Lack of quality content is. Lack of an entrepreneurial mindset is.
Let's say for the sake of argument that you were to create a piece of content that you knew 100% would go viral if enough people saw it. Your friends would share it on their FB page, people would post it to Reddit, etc.
If your livelihood was dependent on this post doing well, would you spend some money to promote it?
If, on the other hand, you knew it was trash and half-assed it because someone told you that you could get free money on here for posting stuff, would you pay to promote it?
The problem is that people don't create shareable, quality content. That is what will grow this platform. That is what will attract people here.
Let's pretend for a second that there were 20 other people who wrote posts like I do. Maybe in a different style, but let's say they were long, engaging and entertaining. Let's say they wrote 2 per week. Let's also say that they paid money to use upvote bots to promote them. What would happen?
You would transform the Trending page overnight. All of a sudden, Steemit would be a fucking cool ass place to go to see what kinds of crazy shit was posted there in the past 24 hours.
How is this not blowing people's minds? Shit, if I had $5m to invest I'd put it all into STEEM, teach people how to write something entertaining and fill the Trending page with posts that I deemed entertaining.
But people don't think big enough. They can't look beyond some random picture of their backyard or their 3 year old that they think is going to get them some pity upvotes. Think bigger.
The addition of literally 20 high quality content creators could blow this platform off the map. Where are they?
Self-voting is not a huge problem. It's more that it's neutral. I don't think it damages the platform that much, it just makes it run completely sideways. You are right that an entrepreneurial mindset is missing. Even looking at bid bots, who are the entrepreneurs? The owners of the bots. They could upvote themselves, but why would they do that when people are paying them far more than their upvotes are worth right now?
The main issue people have with self voting is just that people upvote themselves instead of quality content, but there honestly isn't much quality content in the first place. Part of the problem is that people just aren't making it, but I think a reason for that is because there is an incentive to make content that appeals to a select few people here on Steemit. If I made an article that went viral and 17 million people read it and loved it, that fact alone earns me 0$. It is only if STEEM holders upvote me that causes me to make a profit. Now, if I wrote that article then I'm sure I would get plenty of high upvotes, the point I'm making is more just that people choose to target those STEEM holders directly. Cater to their interests, write articles about STEEM itself, it is the one thing we all have in common after all. This leads to the content on the site being very insular, and not having broad outside appeal, because why should it? I don't make money from making things that everyone loves, I make money from making things that STEEM whales love.