As a newcomer here to the steem blockchain, I was put off pretty substantially by the realization that there's such a tremendous amount of automation happening. I find the idea of 'autovoting' to be very similar to the act of 'subscribing' to something on youtube. I think you're correct in your assessment that the act of autovoting itself is not the problem, but the way in which it is used.
My initial take on the matter is definitely not in favor of stagnant accounts that exist only to extract from the reward pool, rather than refining the quality of content. It would be silly to not acknowledge that there is a pretty extreme centralization of power and resources on steemit / steem. Perhaps adding some form of auto-refresh of a public key for each individual account you're 'autovoting' for would disincentivize / make it more difficult to just 'subscribe to everything forever'. This may allow things to form groups / communities / networks on a more fluid, organic and cohesive manner while making it harder for individuals to form a 'dynasty' account. The more engaging content producers will be able to capture more attention than those that don't produce as much content. And those that post sporadically, but still garner attention from interesting content would still be able to drum up interest with their strong content, or be wise to invest in promoting their content.
The thing is, I am giving people the benefit of a doubt in assuming that these stagnant accounts didn't intend to become stagnant accounts. Just over time apathy sets in and now here we are.
1% of users controlling the majority of the Steem Power sounds an awful lot like the society we are so intent on freeing ourselves from.
We keep hearing about upcoming "Communities" so hopefully some things will be addressed when those come up. Who knows.
We are still the early arrivers on the platform, so we will see what the future holds and one day all be whales!
I agree that this platform is still in its infancy and has a lot of capacity qnd potential. The voting bots, etc, struck me as a bit of a necessity while the user base grows, and hopefully they will get phased out over time.
Either way, it should be malleable and and tp be changed as time goes on. I'm interested to see what we can all build together.